Virtual reality has seen many implementations in the education and simulation sector, from brain surgery to military operations. VR (virtual reality) based law enforcement training is now available for police officers to quickly and safely prepare them for various situations.
One of the newest players in the field, V-Armed is a creator of virtual simulations for large-scale, multi-person workouts. Participants move around in a large, mostly empty space, and with the help of head-mounted displays (VR glasses), body sensors, proxy weapons, and strategically placed doorways, experience tactical scenarios as if they and their fellow officers were actually there.
The virtual reality experience, developed using the Unreal Engine, includes realistic environmental and human visuals, sound effects, and other sensory cues designed to evoke the same mental and physical challenges as the real thing, up to and including the adrenaline rush participants feel. as the script unfolds. As in a real situation, the participants are free to call and gesture to each other. Team personnel can view the session from any angle and can also replay the session later.
“The goal of V-Armed is to help people learn better,” says Elad Dabush, Head of Technology Innovation at V-Armed. “For law enforcement, training in real locations can be very limited. For example, in some training environments, you cannot shoot above a certain height or in certain directions because the bullet may land outside the safe boundary. In VR it doesn't matter. It's a full 360/6DOF environment and the bullets are virtual."
Create a believable virtual environment
Prior to launching V-Armed three years ago, the team worked in film and video production for many years, creating numerous television commercials. This experience demonstrates the internal reaction of the participants. “After telling stories on TV, we instinctively know exactly which elements to include, those that will create the stress and tension that would be present in a real-life scenario,” says Rotem Schiffman, head of development at V-Armed. “That tension is absolutely essential for an effective training experience.”
Schiffman explains that when a user can forget that they are in virtual reality, their body starts to react in the same way as in real life. The VR scenario must be realistic enough on multiple levels visually, emotionally, physically to fool the learner's brain into thinking that he or she is really there. Real-world physics and lighting, realistic weapons and uniforms, and realistic sound effects are just some of the tools used to achieve this.
Creating such an experience is not just about recreating the environment down to the smallest detail with high resolution 3D models. In fact, it will be an obstacle to VR playback speed. In VR, a vital part of its implementation is keeping the frame rate high enough to refresh quickly and move smoothly, which means choosing your battles with levels of detail in mind.
“It's not just visual fidelity and realism. It's authenticity," Dabouche says. “We found that texturing, lighting, shading and overall mood matter far more than polygon counting, especially with our target audience. If a wall or piece of furniture is not 100% realistic, it will not register with most trainees. But it is important that the weapons they are holding are absolutely correct, and that their uniforms are accurate. Those are the things that make space real to them."
With the right balance of realistic detail and playback speed, V-Armed scenarios are the perfect setting for exciting workouts. “We see students coming out at the end with palpitations and shortness of breath,” Schiffman says. "You can tell by their voice that they act like they're really in that setting."
One of the V-Armed training sessions was recently featured on ABC News, where senior law enforcement officials praised the effectiveness of the training as well as the value of verifying an officer's performance after the fact. They also recognized the convenience of being able to train hundreds of officers in any virtual location without the hassle of real logistics.
Development of learning with the Script Editor
Late last year, V-Armed was renting a space in Brooklyn, New York, when by chance an NYPD detective saw their sign and stopped by. This auspicious start led V-Armed to offer NYPD VR training for free. The training was made possible with the support of the Department of Homeland Security and the Academy of Counter-Terrorism Education at Louisiana State University (LSU NCBRT/ACE).
V-Armed has built the Scenario Editor, its own scripting tool, on top of Unreal Engine so that training leaders can customize the work themselves and create completely new scenarios in the environments. For example, certain types of civilians can be added to make the scenario more realistic, such as children for a school environment, or a mixture of genders and ages in an open park.
Schiffman wrote the Scenario Editor to meet the NYPD's requirement that trainees go through many different scenarios. Instead of V-Armed creating scripts themselves, they let users create and modify them as they saw fit. Starting with a basic layout such as a school, warehouse, or park, the trainer can drag and drop furniture, props, avatars, audiovisual stimuli, and action triggers into the layout, building up to completion of the scenario.
“The Scenario Editor allows trainers, even those with no development experience, to create a training scenario from scratch,” Schiffman says. “For example, the user can place an enemy and civilians in room A and add a trigger so that when a member enters room B, the enemy will start shooting, directing the members' attention to that room. It is a very flexible tool that allows them to create many scenarios for a variety of learning purposes. In addition, the operator can monitor and initiate actions in real time as the scenario unfolds.”
The analysis tools included in the system provide law enforcement with capabilities they have never had with real-time training. For example, a senior officer can play back a top-down session and evaluate the performance of a particular employee or the entire team. With live training, this is simply not possible. And after they've passed dozens or hundreds of officers through training, the team can analyze patterns and identify areas for improvement.
V-Armed has also released a more mobile version of the system that can be shipped and installed within days. All that is required is a place with enough space.
“Our vision is to bring this amazing training tool to every agency that needs it,” says Dabush.
Choosing an Unreal Engine to work with
Dabush and Schiffman have been working with real-time technology since they were in the entertainment industry. “We tried some other engines, but we started getting better results a lot faster in Unreal,” says Dabush.
The team loves the fact that for learning and modeling solutions, they can use C++ for all their low-level code, along with Blueprints for script-specific code. The fact that open source code gives them the ability to debug much faster. V-Armed implements all of its base code as a series of plugins on top of a standard Unreal Engine build and attaches plugins to all projects they create.
“We typically prototype using Blueprint and extract all the reusable parts into our shared C++ libraries, leaving only the bare minimum of high-level Blueprint work that we need to do on a project-by-project basis,” Schiffman says. "Unreal's two-tier development environment is very helpful in this regard."
It was these features, and the visual fidelity and playback speed they were able to achieve, that sealed the deal for the real-time engine of choice. "Without Unreal," Schiffman says, "we couldn't have done this."
Looking to the future
These early successes have made V-Armed excited about using VR to train police officers in the future. “Learning from PowerPoint presentations is a thing of the past,” says Dabush. “Once you put on a headset and see that the virtual avatar teaches you and shows you something, and you have memories of being in a certain situation, it has an impact and teaches you much better.”
Shifman shares the view that this is a definite way out for law enforcement. “What we do is not just marksmanship training. There are many decisions to be made when shooting. And more importantly, when not to shoot.”
