Feb 2025 Update: Pizza Maths Virtual Reality ( v0.5) Testing
Here at Pizza Maths HQ we got off to a flying start in 2025. Thanks to some heroic efforts from our Chief Technical Officer, we managed to get a 0.5 version of Pizza Maths ready in time for BETT 25. The 0.5 release is our “candidate” Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The user feedback from this round of testing, involving nearly 100 test subjects, will be used to create the alpha version of Pizza Maths that will be launched in Autumn 2025, just in time for the new academic year.
While we didn’t have an official stand for Brain Man VR (BMVR) at the 40th anniversary addition of world’s oldest and favourite Education Technology conference, we still had a presence across all three days. Below I describe some of the highlights and the method we used to demonstrate our Pizza Maths VR app, despite not having an official base from which to exhibit our wares.
CEO Richard Lewis and CSO Alex Papaioannou venturing into BETT 2025 at the ExCel on Day 1.
Testing the candidate MVP
This coming month will be a frenetically busy one for BMVR as we’re looking forward to testing Pizza Maths with five different educational establishments including Latymer Upper School and the French Lycee in London, Witchford Village College in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire College and, last but not least, City of London Girls. Thanks to the generosity of Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), who donated ten Quest 2 headsets to our cause, we can now give several learners a taste of Pizza Maths at the same time, which means everybody should get the chance to have a go. We’re delighted that PWC are so keen to help young people improve their maths skills.
February also sees the launch of our Pizza Maths Student Ambassador scheme. Any student who is familiar with VR, interested in making learning maths more fun and wants to gain experience in Agile development of VR applications can sign up to run user testing sessions in their school. Our first Pizza Maths Student Ambassador is twelve-year-old Isaac who lives on the border of Lancashire and Cumbria, which means he can cover two counties for us. He lives in Lancashire and so - with the help of his dad - he will be doing testing with friends from the former primary school in his home town. His high school is over the border in Cumbria, so he will also be able to do user testing with several fellow pupils in after-school sessions.
If you know of a young person based somewhere in the UK who is a bit of a computer whizz kid, is bright and responsible, who might enjoy learning about software product development by becoming a Pizza Maths Student Ambassador, please ask them to get their parent, teacher or guardian to drop us an email (www.brainmanvr.co.uk/contact-us) so we can get them up and running.
Highlights of BETT 2025 – Day 1
Day one of BETT25 saw our CEO and Chief Strategy Officer, Alex Papaioannou, meet with BETT representatives for an eye-opening introduction into the many ways the conference helps EdTech start-ups build their networks of future customers, collaborators and competitors. It turns out that not only do all the major tech companies as well as start ups in the education space like ours exhibit there, but delegations are sent from educational establishments and governments all over the world to see what innovations might soon be available for use in schools in their nations.
We then hot-footed it the Meta stand to watch a couple of talks about the use of VR immersive experiences in education, one of their major focuses for 2025. We caught up with old friends like Body Swaps CEO Christophe Mallet who our own CEO – Richard Lewis – worked with briefly back when Body Swaps was making its early inroads into VR soft skills training. Fast forward four years, from 2021 to 2025 and their global expansion has been so successful that they were invited to feature their products at the Meta stand. BMVR have been equally delighted and inspired by the huge success that Body Swaps has become, with thirty-something employees around the world now.
It was fantastic to see how far Body Swaps have come with their Virtual Reality Soft Skills training in just a few short years; exhibiting from the Meta stand no less!
Speaking of successes, we also saw David Whelan, CEO of Engage XR Holdings PLC, who was also exhibiting at the Meta stand on day 1. Engage XR has been around much longer than Body Swaps and had been developing their multiuser VR solutions for meeting, conferencing and education since 2016. They were in the game long before the Covid-19 lockdown drew the world’s attention to the unique opportunity presented by immersive environments in terms of bringing large numbers of people together into the same virtual space, regardless of where in the world the attendees happen to be. Incidentally back in 2019, our CEO actually gave an intercontinental VR talk on the brain, via the Engage platform, to an audience of people who were physically located in North America, South America, Asia and Europe. Despite the thousands of miles of separation they could ask questions at the end freely, as they normally would in a live talk, and turn to interact with people in the neighbouring seats exactly as if they were side-by-side in a real life auditorium. The main difference being that this particular meeting was being held in a lunar base! Engage XR Holdings PLC floated on the stock exchange in March 2018 and has been guided expertly by David Whelan, who kindly agreed to sit on the advisory board of BMVR, ever since.
Our final bit of news from the Meta stand was that we met a senior producer from BBC Bitesize, whose GCSE Maths resources were invaluable for us at BMVR when we were going through the process of familiarising ourselves with the syllabus last spring. We simply couldn’t miss the opportunity to quickly show her Pizza Maths 0.5 to find out what she thought of it. So strictly speaking we also exhibited, albeit briefly and unofficially, at the BETT 25 Meta stand too 😉
We were delighted when a representative from BBC Education showed an interest in trying Pizza Maths. She was also kind enough to show us some of the new BBC Bitesize learning materials.
Days 2 and 3 of BETT 2025
On the Thursday and Friday, between checking out the Google, Microsoft, Kahoot, Canva and Class VR stands, not to mention the numerous maths offerings from lovely start ups like the Bow Tie Techer (NB that were invariably flat screen experiences), we also continued our maverick efforts to get feedback on the 0.5 release of Pizza Maths VR. We found an unoccupied pitch in the North Hall over near the other entrepreneurial start up enterprises and enticed people to have a go in a completely empty exhibiting space simply by going into VR and playing the game. When it comes to attracting attention at a professional conference there is nothing quite like VR. We proved at BETT 25 that you can dispense with quite literally ALL the promotional materials, branded assets and visual merchandising simply by activating the mirror neurons of every single person who passes by and glances over.
Mirror neurons fire in our brains when we perform a purposeful movement and when we watch other people carry out interesting looking sequences of body movement. We build Pizza Math VR to make learners feel like they really are in a pizza diner preparing food for customers. Which means when you see a person in a VR headset playing pizza maths you see them moving around in a way that suggests they are doing something interesting, but without having any idea what world they’re in. It is impossible to walk past without wondering what they are doing so intently in that virtual world. So whenever I peeked out from under the VR headset and saw someone looking at me quizzically I’d simply beckon them over and ask if they wanted to have a go. Not a single person declined the offer. And so we got some incredibly useful feedback from a) people looking for innovative maths solutions for the learners in their educational establishment, b) other educational VR developers from universities and the military, c) groups of school children who happened to passing and d) investors.
The Future’s Bright
BMVR is steaming into a bright and glimmering future where learners enjoy improving their maths skills as much as they love gaming. We already have one partnership in place with the University of Leicester whose maths department is helping us to create new mini-games and another is likely to spring up in the next weeks with a Masters degree in XR development at a University in Denmark.
Talk to us!
If you are an investor interested in availing yourself of the advantages of the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (we are SEIS approved), a parent who wishes to enrol your child in the Pizza Maths Ambassador Scheme or a Head of Maths who’d like to have BMVR visit your school to run a user testing session, please do drop us a line. We’d be delighted to hear from you: Contact Us
