Two people who kept meeting the same problem
This story starts with two people rather than a company. Leonie Sanderson and Simon Lowe ran the seniors programs for two state governments, met at a workshop, and grew impatient with how slowly anything changed for older Australians.
Their public work on ageism led to The Ageing Revolution, then a long partnership with Equal Reality, now a subsidiary of People Tech Revolution, and its 2018 VR library.
In late 2020, they founded People Tech Revolution to build technology for social good.
The thread running through all of it is VR built for diversity, equity and inclusion.
The medium changed. The question did not.
Both of them ran seniors programs inside state government, and both got tired of watching good intentions move slowly. What they wanted was a way for someone to feel the other side of a conversation, not read about it.
Everything since has been the same question in different materials: a card game, a VR library, an AI practice partner. The technology is whichever one puts a person closest to the moment they need to handle better.
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Built with the people it is for
The scenarios are written with the people they are about, in the rooms where the conversations happen: a ward, a depot, a council counter, a classroom.
That is why the work travels. A conversation rehearsed in one hospital holds up in another, because what was designed was the moment, not the software.
One drive, and everything that came after it
In 2015 two state government managers got in a car and interviewed older Australians about what ageing felt like. The card game, the VR library and the AI practice partner all trace back to that trip.
What follows is the same question in different materials, told in the order it happened.
The story, year by year
From a car full of interviews to a company that builds the rehearsal room, told a year at a time.
2015: Brisbane
The drive that started it
Leonie Sanderson was managing Queensland's Office for Seniors when she met Simon Lowe, her New South Wales counterpart, at a state managers' workshop.
Both were frustrated by the pace of change, so they got in a car and drove, interviewing older Australians about what ageing felt like.
What they heard became The Ageing Revolution, founded in Brisbane in October 2015 to take on ageism. It remains a separate company and continues its own work today.
"The whole idea of The Ageing Revolution was to look at ageism, and how we can change the conversation to a more positive one."
Simon Lowe
Co-founder, People Tech Revolution and, before it, The Ageing Revolution, the first business he and Leonie Sanderson founded. SAE University College, 2018
2017: Vivid Sydney
Ageism, argued from a stage
Three years before PTR existed, its founders were on stage arguing that ageism was the next frontier. On 16 June 2017 Leonie Sanderson and Simon Lowe presented "Ageism - The Next Frontier" at the Vivid Ideas Exchange, MCA Australia.
The Ageing Revolution presented the session in collaboration with Equal Reality, and Vivid Sydney's listing for it survives on the Wayback Machine.
2018: Everyday Inclusion
A library that is still called seminal
Everyday Inclusion launched in 2018 under the Equal Reality name, alongside sibling titles Finding Common Ground and Speak to Me Normally.
Today Everyday Inclusion is one module of the PTR VR Library, a three-part VR experience on unconscious bias, inclusion, microaggressions and intersectionality, alongside Finding Common Ground, Speak to Me Normally, Lift VR and Mind Shift.
2020: PTR is founded
A home for technology put to work
People Tech Revolution was founded in late 2020 by Simon Lowe, who leads it as CEO, and Leonie Sanderson, its Design and Engagement Director. It began as a home for people who wanted to put technology to work for social good.
The organisations that come to it share one problem: people learn by doing, the doing is rarely safe, and roleplay and simulation are expensive to run at any scale.
A person can practise the same hard moment as many times as they need, with nothing real at stake.
More than a decade of immersive and game design work sits behind that: The Ageing Revolution from 2015, the Equal Reality partnership from at least 2017, then PTR.
2021 to 2022: six aged care facilities
Headsets in the residents' rooms
COVID shut the doors of aged care homes and left residents in their rooms. QUT Design Lab's Transforming Aged Care with Virtual Reality put headsets into the rooms with them, across six aged care facilities in Queensland and Victoria.
Leonie managed it through The Ageing Revolution, on a philanthropic research grant from Facebook. ABC News filmed a resident at Arcare Pimpama going back to the London and Germany of her youth, and the free toolkit it produced is still online.
2023: Aerospace Xelerated
Selected by an accelerator Boeing backs
PTR was selected for cohort 4 (2023) of the Boeing-backed Aerospace Xelerated accelerator.
"We could see how powerful VR is at giving people 'a-ha moments' and wanted to create training that has an impact on people's behaviours."
Leonie Sanderson
Co-founder, People Tech Revolution. Startup Spotlight, Aerospace Xelerated, 2023
2024: A Good Design Award
A card game about the conversation nobody starts
Out of The Ageing Revolution's work came Carked It!, a card game that uses humour to get people talking about death and dying.
In 2024 it won the Australian Good Design Award in the Social Impact category, credited by Good Design Australia to The Ageing Revolution with the Good Death Impact Network and the Australian Centre for Social Innovation.
PTR works in virtual reality and AI now rather than cards, but Carked It! is where the method is easiest to see: give people a way to rehearse the conversation before they have to have it. The game has its own site at carkedit.com.
The rooms those years happened in
A workshop table in Sydney, a studio portrait, a bowls club in Queensland and a tech council stage. The same method, a decade apart.
2024: the year the work got named out loud
A finalist's table in Brisbane and a launch night in Townsville, four months apart, and in the same year the Queensland Government's Ignite Ideas Fund backed the Immersive VR Library with a $95,000 grant, listed with the other Round 11 recipients.
2025: Featured in Forbes
Read below the surface, in Forbes
The article examined how immersive VR training builds empathy and drives behavioural change in leadership development, naming PTR's work with Google, Etihad Airways, Mayo Clinic and Mater Education.
"It's not just about seeing a different perspective - it's about feeling it. That's where real change begins."
Simon Lowe
CEO, People Tech Revolution. Forbes, June 2025
What that story adds up to
Our values, our mindsets and one instinct: take the subject people avoid, and make it safe to approach.
The values are visible in the room
Four values shape that work, Community, Excellence, Trust and Creativity, and four mindsets describe how the team works day to day: curious, collaborative, empathic and action-oriented. What each means in practice is on Our values.
The team's work now spans artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality, custom-built for organisations across health, education, government, resources and enterprise.
Co-created with the people closest to the work
PTR starts with the people closest to the work. Every scenario is co-created with the practitioners who will run it, in their language, around the situations they face.
It is the same instinct each time. A card game about death. A VR experience that puts you in someone else's shoes. An AI conversation for grief. A rehearsal for the hardest conversation at work.
Mater Education's "Speaking with Good Judgement: Through the Looking Glass" VR program is one example: Advance Queensland awarded PTR $40,000 toward it and Mater Education put in a further $110,000, as Advance Queensland's own story describes.
The people behind the method
The rooms where a scenario gets argued over before anyone builds it, and the people it is argued with.
How a story becomes a scenario
Media, transcript and timing get arranged around one person until the scene plays the way the room really goes.
The rest of the delivered work is in Case studies, and the independent research behind it is on Research and evidence.
Beyond the studio
The same conversations get had at panels and consumer forums, where the people the training is for are in the room.
Meet the values and mindset behind this story on Our values, how it plays out step by step on Our approach, and the studios PTR works alongside on Partners.
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Where this story goes next
The same thread runs through the rest of the site: what we hold ourselves to, how a build happens, who we do it with, and what it changed for the people who used it.
Or start where your own problem sits
Ways in, depending on whether the moment needs a headset, a screen, or something working in a fortnight.
