Ryan Burns is a Product Manager at TeachAids, a world leader in designing, producing, and distributing health education used in 82 countries. At TeachAids, he works on the CrashCourse product suite, which is designed to provide athletes, parents, coaches, and the sports community with the latest medical knowledge on the prevention and treatment of concussions through videos and virtual reality. TeachAids’ VR work is featured by Oculus’ VR for Good platform and used by most of the organized youth football community. Their latest VR production was presented in collaboration with 17 of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s national sports governing bodies including USA Wrestling, USA Football, USA Baseball, and USA Hockey. Prior to TeachAids, Ryan worked with Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab where he studied social presence in virtual reality. At Strivr, he supported the development of sports training tools in VR. In 2016, he was the starting quarterback at Stanford where he experienced multiple concussions. His 15 years of experience on the field coupled with this background in VR has allowed him to build authentic, engaging and immersive experiences to enhance education for the sports community.

Ryan examines how the exploration of actual concussion experiences informed decision processes in developing immersive experiences to teach athletes about the causes and prevention of debilitating head injuries from sports.