This growing Houston startup is making training programs safer and cheaper with VR applications

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VR training startup, HTX Labs, recently brought on Houston-based Solvay GBU Peroxides North America as a client. Trainees can work on a digitized version of the plant that looks as real as could be. Courtesy of HTX Labs

Many employers are doing reality checks when it comes to workplace training. They're wondering how they can better train their workers. But they're realizing that traditional training can be dull and even unproductive, so they're enlivening and enriching their training through virtual reality.

Houston-based startup HTX Labs LLC is one of the tech companies at the forefront of the VR-infused modernization of workplace training. Among its customers are the United States Air Force, Mastercard, Rackspace, and Houston-based Solvay GBU Peroxides North America, a maker of hydrogen peroxide.

For the Air Force, HTX Labs creates software that provides immersive training for pilots on how to deal with emergency procedures in the air and on the ground. This is something that traditionally has been carried out only with expensive simulators. Mastercard and Rackspace rely on HTX Labs' technology to teach employees — through VR-generated replicas of actual workspaces — how to handle active-shooter situations, workplace violence, and fires.

Solvay turned to the company for VR-propelled help with training workers about loading and unloading hazardous materials and other aspects of maintaining safety around potentially dangerous chemicals. HTX Labs and Solvay will jointly resell their VR-based courses to other companies, says Scott Schneider, founder and CEO of HTX Labs.

At its core, the company's VR training zeroes in on the trainee, providing engaging, interactive experiences that stress "learning by doing," Schneider says.

Training programs that have been around for decades are "designed for trainers, not necessarily for trainees," he says.

"A PowerPoint presentation, a YouTube video — it's all about the message the trainer wants to convey as opposed to 'Let's think about how people actually learn.' Studies show people learn by actively doing — active learning versus passive learning," Schneider continues. "We married that idea of active learning with virtual reality and immersive technology to deliver a learning experience that increases retention and the development of muscle memory."

In a VR-based training session, participants are equipped with VR headsets and are plunged into realistic environments where they're presented with scenarios in which they, for instance, pick up a fire extinguisher and put out a blaze, or they land or eject from a military jet that's experiencing a problem such as an engine fire.

Schneider says this type of interactive training helps participants boost the amount of information they remember. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, VR learners retain 75 percent of what they've been taught, compared with a 10 percent retention rate from reading or listening to a presentation.

"It's a much better way, a much more realistic way to learn," Schneider says.

Employers big and small are catching on to this kind of advanced training. According to Schneider, software produced by companies like HTX Labs allows employers to conduct training that:

  • Avoids unsafe real-life settings in favor of safe virtual settings.
  • Does not disrupt workplaces.
  • Reduces costs.

A CNBC article says the cost-saving aspect appeals to a number of employers like Boeing, UPS, and Walmart.

"Training facilities cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to build. Sending out-of-town employees to them racks up travel expenses. And the lost time for training is considerable," the article reads.

By comparison, a one-time investment in VR hardware and software — technology that can be used by many workers — might cost a couple of thousand dollars per employee.

"Most companies in the private sector are dipping their toes into it a bit, maybe doing some stuff internally," Schneider says of VR-based training. "But on a larger scale, there's not a lot of players doing exactly what we're doing."

Schneider envisions HTX Labs, which was founded in 2017, expanding into training centered on augmented reality and mixed reality.

For the uninitiated, VR refers to computer-generated 3D environments that you interact with and are immersed in, according to Live Science. AR superimposes sounds, images and text onto what you see in the real world, along the lines of "Minority Report" or "Iron Man," Live Science explains.

"Mixed reality is the result of blending the physical world with the digital world," according to Microsoft. "Mixed reality is the next evolution in human, computer, and environment interaction, and unlocks possibilities that before now were restricted to our imaginations."

No matter the type of technology, HTX Labs strives to "humanize training" by putting the student at the center of the learning experience, Schneider says.

For now, HTX Labs produces VR training software under the EMPACT brand name and teams up with hardware vendors to sell turnkey offerings.

Today, the company employs 12 people, all of whom are in Houston. Schneider would like to increase HTX Labs' headcount by 50 percent before the end of 2019. Also this year, Schneider hopes to raise its first round of outside capital, but only after HTX Labs secures more private and government contracts. And he doesn't rule out enlarging the company through M&A activity.

Overall, Schneider sees tremendous potential for HTX Labs, as pretty much any employer can benefit from VR training for its workers. VR training — already part of a multibillion-dollar VR market — is expected to be so pervasive, in fact, that software review website Capterra predicts one-third of small and midsize businesses in the U.S. will be piloting VR training of employees by 2021.

"VR is … being used to enhance employee training to give workers immersive 'learning by doing' opportunities they can't find in a classroom or online course," Capterra notes. "It's a revolution in an area that's historically been static and unengaging for workers."


The U.S. Air Force also uses HTX Labs' technologies to train for emergency response procedures.Courtesy of HTX Labs

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New Rice Brain Institute partners with TMC to award inaugural grants

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The recently founded Rice Brain Institute has named the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

The new grant program brings together Rice faculty with clinicians and scientists at The University of Texas Medical Branch, Baylor College of Medicine, UTHealth Houston and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The program will support pilot projects that address neurological disease, mental health and brain injury.

The first round of awards was selected from a competitive pool of 40 proposals, and will support projects that reflect Rice Brain Institute’s research agenda.

“These awards are meant to help teams test bold ideas and build the collaborations needed to sustain long-term research programs in brain health,” Behnaam Aazhang, Rice Brain Institute director and co-director of the Rice Neuroengineering Initiative, said in a news release.

The seed funding has been awarded to the following principal investigators:

  • Kevin McHugh, associate professor of bioengineering and chemistry at Rice, and Peter Kan, professor and chair of neurosurgery at the UTMB. McHugh and Kan are developing an injectable material designed to seal off fragile, abnormal blood vessels that can cause life-threatening bleeding in the brain.
  • Jerzy Szablowski, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice, and Jochen Meyer, assistant professor of neurology at Baylor. Szablowski and Meyer are leading a nonsurgical, ultrasound approach to deliver gene-based therapies to deep brain regions involved in seizures to control epilepsy without implanted electrodes or invasive procedures.
  • Juliane Sempionatto, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and Aaron Gusdon, associate professor of neurosurgery at UTHealth Houston. Sempionatto and Gusdon are leading efforts to create a blood test that can identify patients at high risk for delayed brain injury following aneurysm-related hemorrhage, which could lead to earlier intervention and improved outcomes.
  • Christina Tringides, assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice, and Sujit Prabhu, professor of neurosurgery at MD Anderson, who are working to reduce the risk of long-term speech and language impairment during brain tumor removal by combining advanced brain recordings, imaging and noninvasive stimulation.

The grants were facilitated by Rice’s Educational and Research Initiatives for Collaborative Health (ENRICH) Office. Rice says that the unique split-funding model of these grants could help structure future collaborations between the university and the TMC.

The Rice Brain Institute launched this fall and aims to use engineering, natural sciences and social sciences to research the brain and reduce the burden of neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental and mental health disorders. Last month, the university's Shepherd School of Music also launched the Music, Mind and Body Lab, an interdisciplinary hub that brings artists and scientists together to study the "intersection of the arts, neuroscience and the medical humanities." Read more here.

Your data center is either closer than you think or much farther away

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A new study shows why some facilities cluster in cities for speed and access, while others move to rural regions in search of scale and lower costs. Based on research by Tommy Pan Fang (Rice Business) and Shane Greenstein (Harvard).

Key findings:

  • Third-party colocation centers are physical facilities in close proximity to firms that use them, while cloud providers operate large data centers from a distance and sell access to virtualized computing resources as on‑demand services over the internet.
  • Hospitals and financial firms often require urban third-party centers for low latency and regulatory compliance, while batch processing and many AI workloads can operate more efficiently from lower-cost cloud hubs.
  • For policymakers trying to attract data centers, access to reliable power, water and high-capacity internet matter more than tax incentives.

Recent outages and the surge in AI-driven computing have made data center siting decisions more consequential than ever, especially as energy and water constraints tighten. Communities invest public dollars on the promise of jobs and growth, while firms weigh long-term commitments to land, power and connectivity.

Against that backdrop, a critical question comes into focus: Where do data centers get built — and what actually drives those decisions?

A new study by Tommy Pan Fang (Rice Business) and Shane Greenstein (Harvard Business School) provides the first large-scale statistical analysis of data center location strategies across the United States. It offers policymakers and firms a clearer starting point for understanding how different types of data centers respond to economic and strategic incentives.

Forthcoming in the journal Strategy Science, the study examines two major types of infrastructure: third-party colocation centers that lease server space to multiple firms, and hyperscale cloud centers owned by providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Two Models, Two Location Strategies

The study draws on pre-pandemic data from 2018 and 2019, a period of relative geographic stability in supply and demand. This window gives researchers a clean baseline before remote work, AI demand and new infrastructure pressures began reshaping internet traffic patterns.

The findings show that data centers follow a bifurcated geography. Third-party centers cluster in dense urban markets, where buyers prioritize proximity to customers despite higher land and operating costs. Cloud providers, by contrast, concentrate massive sites in a small number of lower-density regions, where electricity, land and construction are cheaper and economies of scale are easier to achieve.

Third-party data centers, in other words, follow demand. They locate in urban markets where firms in finance, healthcare and IT value low latency, secure storage, and compliance with regulatory standards.

Using county-level data, the researchers modeled how population density, industry mix and operating costs predict where new centers enter. Every U.S. metro with more than 700,000 residents had at least one third-party provider, while many mid-sized cities had none.

ImageThis pattern challenges common assumptions. Third-party facilities are more distributed across urban America than prevailing narratives suggest.

Customer proximity matters because some sectors cannot absorb delay. In critical operations, even slight pauses can have real consequences. For hospital systems, lag can affect performance and risk exposure. And in high-frequency trading, milliseconds can determine whether value is captured or lost in a transaction.

“For industries where speed is everything, being too far from the physical infrastructure can meaningfully affect performance and risk,” Pan Fang says. “Proximity isn’t optional for sectors that can’t absorb delay.”

The Economics of Distance

For cloud providers, the picture looks very different. Their decisions follow a logic shaped primarily by cost and scale. Because cloud services can be delivered from afar, firms tend to build enormous sites in low-density regions where power is cheap and land is abundant.

These facilities can draw hundreds of megawatts of electricity and operate with far fewer employees than urban centers. “The cloud can serve almost anywhere,” Pan Fang says, “so location is a question of cost before geography.”

The study finds that cloud infrastructure clusters around network backbones and energy economics, not talent pools. Well-known hubs like Ashburn, Virginia — often called “Data Center Alley” — reflect this logic, having benefited from early network infrastructure that made them natural convergence points for digital traffic.

Local governments often try to lure data centers with tax incentives, betting they will create high-tech jobs. But the study suggests other factors matter more to cloud providers, including construction costs, network connectivity and access to reliable, affordable electricity.

When cloud centers need a local presence, distance can sometimes become a constraint. Providers often address this by working alongside third-party operators. “Third-party centers can complement cloud firms when they need a foothold closer to customers,” Pan Fang says.

That hybrid pattern — massive regional hubs complementing strategic colocation — may define the next phase of data center growth.

Looking ahead, shifts in remote work, climate resilience, energy prices and AI-driven computing may reshape where new facilities go. Some workloads may move closer to users, while others may consolidate into large rural hubs. Emerging data-sovereignty rules could also redirect investment beyond the United States.

“The cloud feels weightless,” Pan Fang says, “but it rests on real choices about land, power and proximity.”

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This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom. Written by Scott Pett.

Pan Fang and Greenstein (2025). “Where the Cloud Rests: The Economic Geography of Data Centers,” forthcoming in Strategy Science.

Houston climbs to top 10 spot on North American tech hubs index

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Houston already is the Energy Capital of the World, and now it’s gaining ground as a tech hub.

On Site Selection magazine’s 2026 North American Tech Hub Index, Houston jumped to No. 10 from No. 16 last year. The index relies on data from Site Selection as well as data from CBRE, CompTIA and TeleGeography to rank the continent’s tech hotspots. The index incorporates factors such as internet connectivity, tech talent and facility projects for tech companies.

In 2023, the Greater Houston Partnership noted the region had “begun to receive its due as a prominent emerging tech hub, joining the likes of San Francisco and Austin as a major player in the sector, and as a center of activity for the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.”

The Houston-area tech sector employs more than 230,000 people, according to the partnership, and generates an economic impact of $21.2 billion.

Elsewhere in Texas, two other metros fared well on the Site Selection index:

  • Dallas-Fort Worth nabbed the No. 1 spot, up from No. 2 last year.
  • Austin rose from No. 8 last year to No. 7 this year.

San Antonio slid from No. 18 in 2025 to No. 22 in 2026, however.

Two economic development officials in DFW chimed in about the region’s No. 1 ranking on the index:

  • “This ranking affirms what we’ve long seen on the ground — Dallas-Fort Worth is a top-tier technology and innovation center,” said Duane Dankesreiter, senior vice president of research and innovation at the Dallas Regional Chamber. “Our region’s scale, talent base, and diverse strengths … continue to set DFW apart as a national leader.”
  • “Being recognized as the top North American tech hub underscores the strength of the entire Dallas-Fort Worth region as a center of innovation and next-generation technology,” said Robert Allen, president and CEO of the Fort Worth Economic Development Partnership.

While not directly addressing Austin’s Site Selection ranking, Thom Singer, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, recently pondered whether Silicon Hills will grow “into the kind of community that other cities study for the right reasons.”

“Austin tech is not a club. It is not a scene. It is not a hashtag, a happy hour, or any one place or person,” Singer wrote on the council’s blog. “Austin tech is an economic engine and a global brand, built by thousands of people who decided to take a risk, build something, hire others, and be part of a community that is still young enough to reinvent itself.”

South of Austin, Port San Antonio is driving much of that region’s tech activity. Occupied by more than 80 employers, the 1,900-acre tech and innovation campus was home to 18,400 workers in 2024 and created a local economic impact of $7.9 billion, according to a study by Zenith Economics.

“Port San Antonio is a prime example of how innovation and infrastructure come together to strengthen [Texas’] economy, support thousands of good jobs, and keep Texas competitive on the global stage,” said Kelly Hancock, the acting state comptroller.

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