Four engagements that show the range of what PTR builds: a hospital culture pilot, a peer reviewed nurse leadership program, a peer reviewed workplace study, and a community disability-awareness project still running today. Central Coast Council joins Mater, Mayo Clinic and Google here because it is PTR's most sustained piece of community-facing work, in a sector the other three do not cover.
Mater's Speaking with Good Judgement (SWGJ) culture program teaches staff to give and receive feedback respectfully, but engagement in the traditional delivery had been declining. Working with Mater Education, Mater Foundation and Advance Queensland, PTR co-designed Through the Looking Glass, a branched VR experience set inside familiar Mater hospital rooms and break areas, where staff make real choices and see the consequences play out. The pilot reached more than 60 participants face to face across Mater's Queensland campuses. As reported by Mater Education following the program evaluation, 93% enjoyed the experience, 90% recorded increased focus, 77% found it more engaging than traditional delivery, and 96% wanted more VR based learning.
Mayo Clinic wanted a way for nurse leaders to practise responding to bias, racism and difficult conversations before meeting them on the floor. A Day In A Lifetime, co-designed with Mayo nursing staff from their own lived experience, is a series of short VR scenarios built for that rehearsal, with small-group facilitated debriefs after each one. Delivered to more than 1,100 nurse and social worker leaders across three major campuses and four US regions, it is documented in a peer reviewed Journal of Nursing Administration paper, which reported that 91.9% agreed the learning objectives were met and 93.4% said the scenario felt like real life.
Google's DEI team wanted training that built empathy through experience rather than lectures, so PTR co-CEO Leonie Sanderson and the Equal Reality team built four original VR scenarios with 13 Google employee volunteers. Each scenario is experienced from two first-person perspectives on the same workplace moment, with a live facilitated debrief afterwards rather than a scripted in-app discussion. Published as a peer reviewed case study at CHI 2024, it reported that 91% of testers said the scenarios felt real, and the first training cohort recorded 4.7 out of 5, or 94%, average satisfaction.
Central Coast Council wanted the wider community, not just its own staff, to understand what people with a disability face in everyday settings like the beach and the local shopping centre. Co-designed with the Council's own Access and Inclusion Reference Group, the VR experience gives participants a first-person perspective of both environments and the barriers they present. Since launch it has been delivered more than 200 times across the community, folded into teacher training, internal council staff training and CSIRO facilitated sessions.