Our approach

We do not arrive with a finished product. Every scenario is built with your practitioners, your language and your real situations, and psychological safety is designed in, not bolted on. Human judgement stays human throughout. That co-design philosophy, set out on our About page, runs through everything below: what we call our stages, how long they usually take, and the questions we ask about privacy, consent and safety along the way.

How we decide the work is real

Before any build, we apply the DICE test, a framework from Stanford's Jeremy Bailenson and the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab for judging when immersive practice earns its place: is the real-life practice Dangerous, Impossible, Counterproductive or Expensive? If the answer is yes, XR or AI may be the right tool. We hold our own pipeline to it, and if the answer is no on all four we say so, including when that means telling a client that VR, AR or AI is not the right solution for them.

How a project moves

A project moves through five stages, published as PTR Labs' process: discovery and consultation, to understand your goals and identify the best tech solution; co-design workshops, collaborative sessions to shape the experience with your team; prototyping and development, building the custom environments, characters and features; testing and deployment, delivered across platforms with analytics and support built in; and ongoing support, staying with you to evolve and optimise the experience.

How long it usually takes

For a custom build, discovery and design typically runs 1 to 3 months: weekly workshopping, an alignment session, a high-level concept document, scripts, storyboards, visualisations and a clear statement of requirements and constraints. Development typically runs 3 to 6 months: draft builds, two to three rounds of feedback, prototypes for user testing, and short fortnightly check-ins so you can see how it is made as it is made. Delivery follows: the final product, supporting guides and workbooks, and a high-level review together before we move into ongoing support.

Co-design with lived experience

Our co-design treats lived experience as equal to professional expertise. One published example: a program built for Central Coast Council was co-designed with the Council's Access and Inclusion Reference Group, and members of that group appear in the VR itself. The design side of that method is psychologist-informed: workshops are shaped and led by co-founder Leonie Sanderson, an experienced facilitator whose formal qualifications are in psychology and communications, and they balance emotional impact against the risk of re-triggering participants.

How we think about governance

In a published article on VR in healthcare workforce training, we set out six considerations we ask organisations to weigh before adopting VR or AI training, and we hold ourselves to the same six on every project: privacy and data protection; ethical design, co-designing bias, trauma or discrimination simulations with the affected groups rather than for them; AI transparency about any embedded AI, its data use and its limitations; informed consent, including pre-briefing, debrief guidance and an opt-out for emotionally charged scenarios; psychological safety and support, with skilled facilitators and structured debriefing; and governance and evaluation, meaning clear approval, review and content-oversight accountability rather than a one-off sign-off.

See Our values for the principles behind this approach, or Our work for how it plays out project by project.