Today we are going to talk about The EDGE Virtual Training Tool
and we are very fortunate to have three of the folks working on the project with us today
We are going to kick things off. I am going to ask some questions.
and then we will open it up for the audience.
So just to get started can you introduce yourselves
and tell us about your role on the project?
I'm Milton Nenneman and I work for the Department of Homeland Security
as the Science and Technology Director, First Responder's group
and I'm the Program Manager from the DHS side for Virtual Training.
Hi, I'm Tammy Griffith I work for the Army Research Lab.
I'm a chief engineer and I'm focused on technology associated with games.
So, we use games technology for training
Bob Walker, I work for Cole Engineering Services. I am the program manager on the contractor side.
Thank you all for being here today.
Can you tell us a little bit about what EDGE stands for first of all
because it is an acronym and also how does project got started?
EDGE stands for Enhanced Dynamic Geo Social Environment
and the way it got started is DHS S&T has a group of First Responders
that help us identify capability gaps.
And the First Responder's identified virtual training
as a capability gap.
So, we said about it out to investigate that to see how
we best might be able to meet those needs cause it's kind of a complex area
and the more we looked at it the more we realized it is very
very complex potentially extremely expensive.
So, during our research we've actually found the Army.
Because we started looking at them
because I was trying to see who else is in that space
who's doing a lot of training and has a big audience of people and
so, we thought of the army and then I ran into Tammy at a conference and
Yeah, and it's been a great relationship because of the fact that you know the
Homeland Security investments and the Army investments
complement one another were able to kind of leapfrog with each other and
build these advancements into both DHS in the Army side
and we built this relationship again with Cole engineering because they have a lot of
expertise in gaming and simulation. So we reached to them.
We've been doing this for a while working with Tammy and then we started working with Milt and
it's just grown from there. We have how many?
Three? Three versions released right now.
So, we just keep developing different scenarios.
Whats some of the information that you gathered from First Responders to build this training?
That was interesting. We were able to pull together police, fire, paramedics,
we even dispatch in. Initially we weren't sure that
dispatch was necessary but then we started listening
to some of these tapes, it was clear that dispatch was key.
So we brought in dispatch and incident command
and we sat down with them for weeks
you know, at multiple times to get the concept of what was needed
and then we would do a spiral development. Get it in front of them
Here's what you said you needed. And one of the things we found out was,
Quite often what they said they needed wasn't exactly what they needed
so, by having spiral development and being able
to expose them to it, they were able to correct
minor course corrections along the way and we were able to give them a
a better product along the way.
Throughout from the very beginning the one thing that we
were very clear about very adamant about was
involving First Responders and identifying the requirements and the capability gap.
And then as we develop something we would always would go back to him say okay
This is what we've got. Will this tool like this meet your training needs?
Because at the end of the day, we want to make sure
that we're meeting the training needs of the first responder community.
And building on this idea, this is a training tool.
This is a virtual training. How do folks get a hold of this training?
So it's not something they can come and attend in person but they can procure this, right?
Well. not even a procurement. You want to go and talk about that?
So it's available, it's a web-based or through a local area network.
So, it's software that once they get permission from DHS to have the software,
they can download everything or we can,
if they're going to install it locally at their facility,
we'll send them the disks, they can install it, and then, it's all handled that way.
So, it's available free of charge to first responders organizations. Fire, Law, EMS.
And so, the way you do it is, you can request through firstresponder.gov.
I think they are going to put the website up there or there's also the...
They can go to cesiedgetraining.com
And then they take requests, we vet that request cause we want to make sure that
this goes out to law enforcement organizations,
fire organizations that are volunteer or a professional full-time,
EMS organizations that can be private or governmental
But something to point out though, is even though it's free
and it's readily available. It's critical that the people who want to use it have the
infrastructure so they need to have computers,
they need to have a network, they need to
have people who know how to work that network so that we can pass traffic,
and most importantly, they need to have trainers.
People who know what they want to train
and are experienced and knowledgeable enough to support that training.
So it's it's a tool, but just like a book or video
it can be misused it needs to be used by knowledgeable and subject matter experts.
Right, this was if it was developed as an open sandbox
a lot of training you go in and the training kind of leads you through certain ways but this is
open so there's nothing prescribed in there.
It's fully open-world, people can do anything they want.
This is a virtual training tool that we use to test or reinforce training. But, really needs to
be accompanied by by instruction by course of instruction some type of training
there is capability where an instructor can monitor,
and actually, should monitor the training activity so then that they
can intervene in a teachable moment.
So, then you can, you have options you can let the
training go and see what happens, you can guide the person and perhaps, better course of action
or you can playback the after-action and you can see from everybody's perspective
exactly what happened and what didn't happen.
One of the things that was determined early on was
we didn't want to put any prescribed doctrine in there because
every jurisdiction does it differently. So this way you
can test out your own doctrine and you can try changes,
you can see what works what doesn't work.
Bob, talk a little bit about First Responder sandbox concept,
because I think what it's hard for people to grasp exactly
what it is when we're talking about it,we're familiar with it, so it's easy for us to assume that
other people know. But it's similar in nature to a video game but, all the critical roles are
acted out by human-driven avatars. So, if you're a police officer
you log in as a police officer, if you're a firefighter you would
log in as a firefighter, EMS person.
There's limited non-playable characters,
artificial intelligence they're really just in there
to help fill out the scene. Everybody that's participating in the training
is going to be a live role player.
And that includes the perpetrator, ...
Yes.
in this case?
So imagine you want to have a kind of I would call it
a simple scenario where you just have a single shooter
and he may be focused on it as specific goal.
You would bring in one live player to play that role
and then you'd have the appropriate response to that.
Now if you want to ramp it up, you don't have to change anything
anything in the game you just have more bad guys log in.
And they're going to make it more complex they might
be setting fires, they might be putting down an explosive
they might do all kinds of different things to make the event more more complex.
And the open sandbox concept. Really originally we had kind of thought of of going with
almost all artificial intelligence, or AI.
Couple of problems with that,
one is to develop a AI game similar to like you would see
in Grand Theft Auto or something like that.
Because the if-then tree is so complex, it's going to cost you about 500 million dollars.
S&T was very generous with our checkbook. However, they were
Not that generous, we had to make some trade offs....[laughter]
Pull some zeros.
Several zeros. [laughter] But, so, cost is one problem
but then the other problem is, is now you have a situation where
where once you play the game a few times, you can game the game.
because I remember watching my son playing video games.
And he is sitting there waiting and I said what are you waiting for?
And he said " Well, I'm waiting for this guy to spawn so I can shoot him"
So you know, you don't. You know, it's kind of like, the game is actually entertaining.
The purpose of this tool is not to be entertaining. The purpose is to train.
Being entertained maybe will enhance attention and retention some other things so that's good.
But, we wanted to make sure that training remained the primary focus.
And so that's why when you have, what we call the exercise cell which is
comprised of bad guys as well as a human-driven civilians.
Because you can have civilians going in there,
they can give you information or misinformation or whatever. You can help,
you can have them do whatever you want to do.
But they can create whatever scenario you want in this is at open sandbox concept
You can create a hostage negotiation situation, you can create a fire, you can create a IED
situation, what, whatever it is situation that you want, to create.
And then you have the responders that are logged in, would then respond
in the manner that they would with their own local department tactics.
For instance if you have an active shooter, your department says you're going to go in
if you're the first guy there, you're going in
or you're going to wait for two guys or whatever your tactics are,
that's what you're going to do.
Or if your agency is in the, has an RTF, Rescue Task Force
where you have, pair up EMS folks law enforcement
going to a warm zone to rescue people.
That would be a decision that would be made by unified command,
then unified command would relay that to the operators
and then they would go in and respond. But that's up to them to actually do that.
Having the full customization in terms of, how the scenario evolves, what the scenario is,
what your reaction capabilities are really makes it something that
all responders can use to train for it sounds like.
Okay, we got a couple questions from Facebook.
Is this training only down loadable to one computer per department
or could several computers access the training?
So there's no limit to the number of people
or computers that can have the software, there's no seat license limit, there's no, no limits at all.
You can load it onto however many computers that you need to.
And then there's also question about can multiple departments play together?
Absolutely, you can do this distributed,
you could do this in a local network,
you could do this across the country. across the world.
When we say distributed we mean Internet- based so we have servers right now in Florida.
So people from all over the country. We just had an exercise this morning while
Tammy and I were flying up here that couple of my guys were helping some people from Texas
actually do some training in there.
So they went in there with them for about an hour in the beginning,
showed them around, told them here's the things you can do.
They did a couple practice scenarios and then my guys
checked out and just left it to them said go train, have fun.
While you can do it distributed it's a lot easier to run an exercise
in a common location, because it's an exercise management issue its not a technology issue.
But sometimes you got to tell people get your hands off the keyboard,
[laughter]were not going in yet. And that can be a challenge
when you are distributing, but its not a technology issue.
That's hard for police.
It is, its is, they want to rush right in.
When we first did it in Sacramento, the initial user test,
everybody sitting there and they were told don't go in, we're going to wait.
As soon as there were shots fired the SWAT, boom! they were right inside,
they were chasing down the bad guy.
Couldn't hold them back.
The instinct still stayed them in the virtual environment.
Right. That's great!
Well they get pumped up because they are hearing the sirens,
the shots and people screaming. It gets them.
but, the other thing too is, I kinda want to really capitalize on this, that
when we say it's free, we mean it's free, there are no costs to organizations.
Like Tammy was saying, the only thing you need to do is have an internet capability
and a desktop or laptop computer.
With a dedicated video card, cause it is a, it's a video game.
Which leads in perfectly to the next question, actually.
And no its not available on tablets because of that,
Because the graphics requirement.
There is one tablet out there that has the graphics card.
it's called the "Edge", surprisingly enough, the Edge tablet, "Razors Edge", and it's not inexpensive.
But they only limitation is that graphics card.
So it's not available on the tablet purely for that reason.
And there's two ways that you can access it like Bob mentioned.
You can request on the websites that we had mentioned earlier
and once, we vet who you are, and your a legitimate first responder organization,
we can either send you a disc that you can then install it on your own intranet
and then run it through your own agency however you wish.
or Cole is managing servers and then you can actually access it online through their servers.
The tool was actually developed to be a cross discipline or cross jurisdiction training tool.
So, if you have multiple agencies, like law enforcement agencies, that maybe
work together they can all log in on the same event so you
can have a large-scale event and you can have multiple agencies work together.
And it's really beneficial for smaller towns where they don't get it
Washington DC, New York, they work together a lot
but when you're in a flyover country, they don't get to do that.
Or even a place like a university, sorry, a university
where they're gonna have all the jurisdictions
around them come and respond to an event like that.
If they can work together in the virtual environment and prepare for that
then there, when actually happens there, they will know everybody's rolls.
Right, and even, I think even equally, if not more important,
it gives an opportunity for like fire and law enforcement
to train together or fire, fire and EMS, normally train together
pretty close anyway. But, law enforcement and EMS to train together.
Because very seldom do they have the opportunity to train together in the real life.
And when we did our exercise, we uncovered a couple of policies
that were counterproductive to them working together.
So then they actually had to go back to noodle that out and say,
in this circumstance what's going to be the policy? What are we going to do?
But it's hard to get those agencies time away from their regular duties.
So if you're in the military, if you're not at war you have an opportunity
to sit down and train, when you train like 95% of you, will train.
Domestic First Responders don't have the military equivalents
of not being at war if you will, that means every day they have to go to work
and serve their community so it's much more difficult for them to get that training time.
Well this raises a very important point.
I think about virtual training versus live exercises.
What are some of the lessons you took from live exercises
and how did you incorporate that into this virtual training?
One of the things that's kind of a setback to live training it's rare,
it doesn't happen often, it's very expensive, its very manpower intensive.
Only a fraction of the training audience actually gets to participate in a live event.
We all, I think, would agree that live training is the best training.
We would never want to try and replace live training.
But if you can get more people through at a lower cost, and
prepare them for that live training, then that's the way to go.
And so, is if, you can sit and do this virtual training multiple times,
then when they do have that live training event it's going to be, they're going to be in top-notch.
It's that much more valuable.
Exactly.
You're ready for it, you don't have to spend as much time saying,
okay, this is how it's going to work if they have drilled on this before or something similar.
Then you can do like refresher training,
things like that, and it also like it is a lead up to a large
scale exercise you can do small unit and individual unit
training a little bit cross discipline training
so when you're in a much more complex environment
you're a little bit more prepared to respond.
Plus you don't have to shutdown an entire block,
city block or an entire building to do the training.
Or even in the event like our next,
the first environment that we have where this training occurs,
is in a multiple-story hotel, 26 or 27 29. I can never remember.
The next environment that we're developing in is in a school.
And so, you don't, sometimes a little.
People are reluctant to go running down hallways
doing shooting active shooter type exercises and drills
in schools, you don't want to traumatize the kids you don't want to create
but you want to be prepared for those eventualities.
But at the same time you know, you don't necessarily,
really, want to negatively impact the student body.
In a virtual training environment, you can do that,
you can do that repetitively without creating any kind of traumatic events.
Another thing that's really neat about it is
when you bring people together from disparate organizations,
sometimes you can expose gaps to their policy.
So everybody thinks they know their job. But when you bring them together,
this gives you an opportunity to kind of wring that out.
Does it really work the way you anticipated it would?
If it doesn't what do we need to do to fix that?
That's pretty neat too.
Bob, I think these might be your questions.
Alright, so let's have a couple more questions from Facebook.
Are these events password protected?
Yes, every user has to have an account so, so every user that logs in,
this is for a distributed event, if you're hosting it on
on a local area network then there are still accounts
But, it's a set of standard set of user name and password for that.
But, if you're logging into our servers or any other in
internet based server, you need an account with a password.
Okay
So I think that what that leads to is;
How are we making sure that these training environments
are truly only allowing in the people that we want to train
and not necessarily exposing our
training event to people who shouldn't be in them.
That's what I think it they're leading up to
and it's probably a good time to talk about the exercise control role,
and all the things that you can do with an exercise controller
cause you can, you can bring people into or kick people out
of the exercise based on what you know.
Yeah, so as there's what we call instructor roles.
So the people doing that have extra privileges within
the simulation, they can kick people out they can heal people if
something happens inadvertently. Ya know, oops, shot myself.
Which does happen.
They can get they can get healed, brought back, they can stop things,
they can basically fly through and see what's going on.
So they can make sure everything is going alright.
So there are some special privileges that the instructors have.
They also see a list of everybody that's in the training.
So, if somebody's not supposed to be there they could boot them.
But, you have to be assigned to a training session.
So there's multiple levels one you have to have an account
to even get into the system, and then you have to be
assigned to a particular training session, and then when you log in
you only have access to the ones that you've been actually assigned to.
Yeah, so if a Police Department A, has an account assigned to him
it's assigned to like an instructor and then that instructor has a password
he gets in and then he or she will invite people that
he or she knows into the training session and that's the
only way you can get into the training session.
So that, and they can control control their own training session.
So, they decide who they want to participate if they want
other jurisdictions is participate they can invite them in.
If they don't then, you just don't get invited, then you can't get in.
And there's also a, there's also the encryption and stuff like that.
It's all, it's all fully SSL encrypted, everything like that
you just can't, people just cant get in there.
Nobody is just showing up out of the blue, like Hi!
I mean, if you're in there, you've either been invited to be part
of a session in which case you're account
is only active for that training session.
The only way to get a permanent account is to
apply for one that then gets fully vetted by DHS.
So good, there sounds like there is some levels of control in terms of,
no ones showing up out of the blue.
It's not really accessible you know to folks outside the...
No, and even if somebody inadvertently gets the software,
they can't really do anything they could start it and it just sits there.
They'd wonder around the hotel by themselves.
It just shows the hotel room. There's no training,
there's no like, if someone somehow were able to get a hold of a disk somewhere.
They could do the training level and that's it.
The only thing you would see is if you the same thing
you would see if you walked into the hotel where we developed this
you would see no training, you would see no tactics, you would see nothing.
To be explicit about what Bob just said
about they would be able to access the training level
what that means is the familiarization how to do walk, how to..
Hit the W key. Your tutorial
Its not training tasks it's not that.
It's the kind of training just how to navigate in the environment.
That's all they would access.
And that's actually, probably a good thing,
because incorporated in this tool is a tutorial training component
to teach you how to make the avatar run walk, crawl, shoot all that kind of stuff.
So you have to do a, do a certain degree
of mastery before you can go in there, because we want people
to have some level of confidence
when they go in there so it doesn't inhibit the training.
We want to make sure that they can get around.
It's much simpler to actually be a student then an instructor,
instructor takes a little bit more skill.
And we actually have tutorial to help them develop that skill.
I was going to ask. So how do you train these trainers?
Since it is something that they need to know,
how to to set up a scenario, invite people.
What opportunities are there for folks to get trained on how to to put on this training?
So we're currently working on that right now,
we have, we can do sessions with the trainers.
For example, the ones we did in Texas,
we had a session with people who we're going to be trainers down there,
so we just kind of walked them through everything,
let them go through, let them take on different roles
so we walked through each and every role that they have
and then we let them loose. And they kind of went around and...
Learned by doing?
Yeah, it's fun when you see all these people
turn into like 12 year olds and they just run around and play.
That's an interesting point right there,
because one of the things you ought to do,
whenever you're using this environment for training, is set aside some playtime
where people are just stupid and they do silly things
that you don't want them to do in a training environment.
but they got to get it out, they gotta get it,
out of their system and what what's neat about it is it also builds familiarity
with the system. Because as their goofing around,
chasing each other and and shooting people that they probably shouldn't be shooting,
they are learning how to use the system.
So even though its a very serious training tool,
letting them play for a few minutes is actually pretty productive.
That's good.
We have a few more questions.
When using an online version, would the department have an account to sign into?
Would it be a department wide account or individual responder?
And could a supervisor log in to see the responders progress and outcomes?
So, if you're if you're doing it through our servers
each person in the training has to have their own account.
Okay
And that could be even, even if it's if somebody was
granted by DHS, granted a training account,
and they sent us a list of all the people for that training session
they still have separate accounts for that.
So it's not a department wide thing you can not share accounts.
as far as that, I forgot what the second part of that was.
So there was actually, I do remember because I wanted to comment on it.
There was a question about can an instructor look
at the students progress, and that's, that's really key to talk about
because that implies a different kind of trainer then we're doing.
What, what were we're not running people
through a training event where they learn,
they learn skills and the instructor says "oh their 75% through
training and they still have 25% more to do".
That's not the way this works this is not that kind of trainer.
This is a scenario that plays out there is no percentage of the way through.
They're all experiencing an event much like a live event
and that and they're all responding to it.
But, at the same time the instructor does have
the ability with those extra privileges,
they have the ability to free fly through the environment
so they can see what's going on. They also have
the ability to what we call soul hop so they can go into
any of the people that are in the training
to see what they're seeing at that current moment in time.
And that's what allows them to say you did this,
we want you to do that in a certain scenario or
this was a really good best practice that we want to share with others.
Here is a recording of it or however they capture that.
There's a full after-action review capability
that has the same kind of functions where you can
free fly or tether yourself to one of the players.
The department wanted to have their own accounts
and that sort of thing they could do that if they ...
Did a local install.
did a local install on their own intranet.
Talk a little bit more about that after action report
because to me that's very important because if you can then replay
the entire event from the perspective of anyone
that participated in it so, so you can see if there, if
somebody did something correct you want to reinforce it,
or if it had a negative outcome, you can go back
there and see the events that led up to that,
and then you could show them you know, individually
say okay here's the things that what led up to that, here's what your options were.
So, its, it will enhance the teachable moment if you will,
and it'll also keep you from getting into those he said she said kind of things
and you could pause, rewind, fast-forward all those capabilities.
So you could actually, at a specific moment,
you can pause and go to the different viewpoints.
This is what you were seeing when you are encountering the suspect,
he was holding somebody hostage, this is
kind of what he saw and then there's a guy on the other side
of the room this is what he saw.
Oh, okay, now I understand why this guy took the shot and not this guy.
And that's, that's to me where the the learning takes place.
You do the after-action review, you talk through, you know,
we've seen it where Incident Command is managing an event
as if everybody's over here is doing things when in actuality they're over here doing things.
Right.
And who's, who's at fault there? Is it because these guys didn't communicate?
You know, there's a lot of complexities that you need to peel back in the
after action review. That's where the learning happens
and then you have an opportunity to replay a similar exercise.
Maybe the same, probably not the same,
something similar and let them reinforce the learning.
That's, that's the power of this.
And the after action review records all the audio too.
So there's, there's three channels for police,
nine, nine for fire it's mind-boggling.
So each one of those audio channels is being recorded
in addition to what we call area chat,
which is kind of like we're talking right now.
So if you're within twenty feet of somebody else,
you can speak and that gets picked up. So you can
isolate those different channels during the play back.
Right, so if the two avatars, you can have a police avatar
and a fire avatar and if they're in the training environment,
and in a game if they're stand within twenty feet of each other
they can just talk,cause you wear a headset when you're playing,
and you can just speak and they can hear each other
and if they move too far away than they won't hear each other
and then you can hit the space bar, which acts as a radio,
but you have to be on the right channel and then
anytime you hit that space bar more than everybody
that's on the same channel as you can hear you.
So the speech is actually mimics quite, quite realistically...
The first responders communications capabilities that they have.
Exactly.
You said something else I really want a kind of foot stomp here.
You need to have two ear headphones
and a microphone to use the system
because you can tell if there's somebody over here making a noise,
your going to hear that it's over here.
It's three dimensional sound.
So you need to have both headphones
and you need a microphone,
and you need a keyboard, and a mouse or a game controller.
But really the keyboard and mouse.
So, um, that, that's and the computer that has a graphics card
you need to have these things in order to use this.
Right, If you have any questions you can always
contact us and we can tell you exactly what you need,
with the computer specs and those kinds of things.
Its also on the website in the FAQ section.
What are the requirements and it lists all the requirements for the...
Awesome!
Got a few more questions.
So there's a comment. Skill sustainment is an essential element
in training and this tool helps meet that need.
So can we talk about how this tool helps skill sustainment?
So we were never hoping to do this as a part task trainer.
We don't teach people how to put their weapon on a target
or how to how to put out, how to read a fire
or anything like that. But those interpersonal skills
that you desperately need to have when
you're working multi-jurisdictional or multi-echelon,
i'm using army terms and I shouldn't,
but intermixing them. But those are the skills that this reinforces.
Right, basically its a lot of collaboration communication,
Unified Command, and there's also a certain amount of
team skills that are built up in here
because as if you're, if you're putting out a fire, you know,
you can have multiple attack points on how to put out the fire.
If you're police officers and your moving to contact or something like that,
you can do two men, two man teams, three men bomb or whatever.
Whatever tactics that you guys end up using in real life
you can you can do it in the game. So there are,
we don't teach you how to handcuff in this,
we don't teach you how to actually shoot at the target range,
don't teach firefighters how to hook up a hose at the hydrant.
It's more at a team, small team, to large team, to cross discipline training.
Next question.
Any plans to mandate this like ICS and NIMS,
so that our upper management will be more open to adopt this type of training?
Funny you should ask that question. [laughter]
So actually tomorrow we're going over to FEMA EMI
to demonstrate this tool to their senior management.
We've already had some communication and stuff with them.
And we are actually in the process, I need, I owe Bob some money [laughter]
But we're augmenting the unified command portion of this
to incorporate ICS and NIMS training a little bit more closely.
So yeah, so we're, that's actually something we're actively doing right now.
Fantastic!
How long will the after-action report be available after the event?
Immediately, once, once the recording started that's the instructor starts it,
it's part of the instructor menu, they hit the start button.
It's there, it takes as long as it takes for once it's closed down for it to save to disk.
And then its available forever?
And then it's available if you were in that training session,
then you have the ability to log back in and see that after action.
Can they save that down to their own computers so that they can...
We are working on that.
The other thing that's good to,
is if you use that after-action report and record it,
you can actually play that back as a demonstrator
to other people, on how to do something. So if you have...
How to or how not to.
[Laughter]You can do either one, you can do either one.
So if you have an experienced team
and you run through a scenario the way you want it done,
or to highlight something you don't want done, you hit the record button,
you run it through then you can play that as a demonstrator to folks.
You know, so they can see the way it should be done for your jurisdiction.
We, at the Department of Homeland Security and the
Army don't want to tell local responders how you respond to an event,
this thing was intentionally developed with agnostic tactics.
It's for your own agency to develop plans and policies
on how you respond to whatever incident.
So everyone can use it, it benefits them
they know that they can work out their most frequent scenarios or,
we know we will be working with these type of jurisdictions,
let's invite them over so that we can train the way we need to.
Cause, like you said, response is gonna differ across the country.
Okay, this is rendered with the Unreal Engine right?
Yes, the hotel is Unreal Engine 3, the school scenario
and going forward will be Unreal Engine 4.
So there's some added features that we get by going Unreal Engine 4.
So, we're doing that, trying to capitalize on all of those new features.
And I want to talk about that, actually,
a little bit more because the benefit of using the Unreal game engine
is that commercial industry has invested many,
many, many millions of dollars in this game engine.
And we're able to leverage that, and not only that,
but they have a market place that, that makes available 3D objects,
very inexpensively, and not just 3D objects, its animations...
There is blueprints, animation, sound effects...
and so it really brings down the cost of our development.
It really, really optimizes.
I mean, even if we have to invest a little bit of time
in taking a 3D model and fitting it towards what we're doing
your matching the, the art styles and everything like that
it's still a lot cheaper than developing everything from scratch
And there's no way the government could ever get to the quality that Unreal is.
And the other thing that Unreal brings to the table
is that if there's a peripheral, lets say,
NH had a mounted display or a game controller or something like that,
that you wanted to, to play in the game, in most cases it's plug-and-play.
I mean there might be some minor modifications but
for the most part because of the game engine being this commercial
readily available entity, it makes it a lot easier to to link to these peripherals.
One other thing that's really good that this, The EDGE, personal training tool
is government owned.
So we own it and we can give it to everybody
that's within the first responder community.
So that way if, if we create our next environment,
we're not, we're not being charged or not charging ourselves than build
another ambulance. Like if this was a proprietary
system we would be paying all over again so
we're not paying Cole Engineering to build anything that's
already been built, everything that we have paid for and built
we get to you reuse for free, it goes up into like an asset library,
if you will, and it's available for us to pull down.
Yeah that's a really good point,
if there's any government other government folks who were listening,
Department of Justice, any, any other government agency
this is another big foot stomp is we are more than happy
to share the source code with any other government agency
that is interested in doing development.
So that's something to consider.
You leverage the work we've both done together.
It goes back to like the original thing like,
we basically threw all of our money in to pots
together and so it we built things that we had a shared cost,
and you know and we'll extend that to other government agencies.
And that's one of the things that Cole engineering does is,
is make sure that the government has full government
purpose rights to everything we do.
That's why we like you.
So that kind of leads into how these scenarios are built
and the care and the time it takes to build each scenario.
So we had the hotel scenario to start with
and the school scenario is coming up in the fall.
Do we have a release date for that yet?
So, I want to correct one little thing.
Its not a hotel scenario or a, or a school scenario.
Those are environments.
Okay, so, so the hotel environment is the object that we,
is the virtual object that we train within.
You can create whatever kind of scenario you want you can create.
It's a common mistake.
So people think that is a prescribed thing but within the hotel
you can create a fire, a shooting,
robbery, whatever it is that you want to create.
So right now we have the, the hotel,
then were in the process right now, the school.
We would eventually, at some point like to get to develop you know,
what we would call an "Any City"
But, right now we're doing research to see, pending funding,
what, what would be our next environment.
We have several candidates right now,
but we don't have our next environment identified yet.
There are people who are interested in using this for wild land firefighting.
You know there's, there's some ports and entry points
you know there's all kinds of things that we can run.
Transportation hubs
Exactly.
Yeah, transportation hubs are really big,
ports are under consideration, wild-land, fire, malls, places of worship.
And that's why eventually we would like to create
like an "Any City" and actually be able to have them
you know, you could be transported...
Right in between different...
Industrial area, school, hotel all that stuff in one kinda small area.
OK, alright, so we will stay tuned for different environments coming up.
I stand corrected.
A couple more questions.
If a department does poorly within a program would DHS
be able to see the results?
And would it have an effect on future grants?
I don't know if, that we could see them.
I know we don't care. [laughter]
Because if we thought you would do perfectly well
the first time out I wouldn't spend the time, effort, money to build a trainer.
So we would expect people to have challenges
initially and then what we would be like to see, is improvement.
And if somebody can say yeah we started out
we really weren't too pretty um, but we're pretty good now
we'd like to hear that kind of feedback.
But, it would not affect any kind of grants. Quite frankly, I don't have the time to,
I don't even know if I could. But, it's not something that I would.
Not unless you were assigned to that session.
Yeah, I don't even think I could get into it.
No, and if it's a local area network installation,
at your own facility, nobody can see, that except people on that network.
Right. Only the participants, only those folks.
They own that, it's theirs they own it.
It's great.
Is there a maritime component or scenario within
the program National, International, Maritime, Law Enforcement Academy?
So, sounds like we are looking at more environments.
[inaudible], We're considering it.
I mean it's, it's on our list of things that we would like to do
especially port facilities you know and that type of a situation.
You know but it's not...[inaudible]
We have talked with the, we've been talking
with the Coast Guard and some other organizations
so we actually have a small demo scenario
that we put together that's a boarding scenario of a boat,
but, it's possible it just hasn't been fully funded.
There is very little I don't think that we can't do.
Right.
Except time and money. [laughter]
Time and money drives everything. [laughter]
Also, we have another question
about the types of scenarios that can be played out in these environments.
Are these all active shooter scenarios? What about hazmat scenarios?
How big are the environments?
And can we get up to a city block with perimeters?
Excellent questions.
So right now we're almost at a full city block.
I think we're at like three quarters of a city block.
Yeah
So you can put up perimeters. They, right now we don't have, [stuttering]
You can create whatever scenario in the environment you want
so it can be an active shooter.
One thing that we do have on our list of things to do is
to augment the hazmat capability.
So right now we have a, we can start a fire, we have an inert IED.
We would like to make that IED that would actually explode.
And then we would like to get some containers
that look like they're spilling either leaky gooey stuff
or gassing up so methyl ethyl bad stuff.
Yeah.
Those are all things that were considering
trying to get into this next round of funding.
So then if we build those little assets, if you will,
we could then put them into any scenario right now.
But so, right now as far as the hazmat stuff is,
really the only thing we have right now is fire and then inert IED.
But we definitely have heard the community
saying that they want hazmat assets.
Yeah.
So, Can you put that back up?
There's a couple other things I was hoping to touch on with regards to this.
Are they all active shooter scenarios? Absolutely not.
You could do purely fire, you can in fact,
we did a scenario with Israel where they had um...
A rowdy party.
loud music in an apartment and we were able to, you know, on the fly just play that out where
the police come up to this rowdy party and they go in
and turns out that there's weapons there.
So, you can do anything you want in this
but the tools are there to take it to a shooter scenario
or to take it to a fire scenario.
And another thing to consider when you're doing hazmat,
if you have a hazardous material and it may disperse
in a certain way, we're already doing smoke, so,
we are already able to have dispersion of this of smoke material.
So having that apply to a hazmat type scenario would not be that difficult,
we just need to have sensors that would indicate
Right
that this is happening in the environment.
And then you recalculate how the damage... How does it damage people smoke?
To that point, if you go into the environment and there's smoke and fire,
if you don't put on your SCBA you will take damage.
You will die. You could actually die.
You could die from the heat of the fire or the smoke.
Yeah, even the firefighters in full protective gear
if they get too crazy, get too deep in to the fire they can die from the heat.
And so, it is fairly realistic.
And the other thing that we have coming out, in the school environment,
that's not quite ready, it doesn't exist in the hotel environment
but in future environments we have less lethal capability for law enforcement.
OK.
So, in addition to shooting people they have a connected energy device,
CED or tazor is the common term or OC spray.
So they can spray somebody with OC or they can taze them.
So, the only options to law enforcement response are not just shooting somebody.
I want point out a couple more things.
One question was how big are the environments?
and we actually have, from the Army side,
we have a really neat little town in Azerbaijan
that we've modeled, it's a real town everything in it, is it's geo specific
and it's a beautiful little town so we've been able to...
it's one click by one click.
One kilometer by one kilometer.
and Cole engineering is actually in the process of doing
some research on how much we can increase that size
and increase the number of entities in the environment
to make it much more complex.
So, that's a little more on the research and development side.
And then yes, it goes back to the city block,
Well that's back to the the Army's investing in that but DHS will benefit
from that down the road, be able to have larger environments as well.
And then another point about the hotel, and this is kind of interesting,
we've gone back and forth about it, it was very very detailed
everything in that hotel is exactly the way it is in the hotel
Even the artwork on the wall.
Even the name of the conference room
patterns in the rug everything.
Patterns in the rug.
So, it was very, very detailed and people say well you don't need
to have it that detailed that's very, true, you don't
but one of the things that's interesting is when we've had police in there,
training in that environment, they say things like, well I cant find the stairs,
this is upstairs, and I can't use the elevator, I can't find the stairs.
Well guess what? If you were in that hotel,
it's marked exactly the way it is in that hotel.
If you can't find them in here, you're not going to find them out there.
So that's one of the benefits of having it very, very high fidelity
is because they're going to run to the same issues.
Some of the other environments that we're considering
don't necessarily need to be so big.
Ya know, we can actually create smaller environments
that are checkpoints or things like that,
so we can create a suite of smaller environments
for different types specialized training.
Would the school scenario only be available to emergency
responders or school personnel also use it?
Good question.
School personnel will definitely be able to use it as well.
All levels of schools, from elementary through university.
We're actually working with the Educator School Safety Network,
my mind went blank for a second
and they're helping to develop a effective use guide for teachers,
for the teachers in the school administration because First Responders get a lot of training.
Yeah.
Teachers and administrators get
different training but certainly not like this,
So, they're, they're they specialize in safe schools
and they're putting together an effective use guide that
DHS is paying for, to let the schools, the teachers, and administrators
get the most effective training out of the EDGE training tool.
Right, because we want them to learn,
police departments have training divisions to train people
school administrators don't have people necessarily
that train them how to use this tool or how to
necessarily respond in an active shooter environment
and Coles done a great job with developing the school app and the a
the capabilities of the teachers in the students
because they will be able to run, hide, fight, barricade doors,
all sorts of things, jump out windows and that sort of thing so its...
Teachers can give commands to the students, so there is a whole command system in there.
Oh, OK.
So if there's a student in the hallway, the teacher sees,
they could say come in here, that can get the student into the classroom.
So it gives them the full range of things that
they may encounter in the situation like that.
And the reason why was really important for us to build this
school scenario is because it's very, very different
than other active shooter scenarios they tend to play out
in the way where by the time police show up
the shooting events is pretty much over
they've either committed suicide or they've done whatever they're going to do.
It is over so the First Responders in that case
are actually the teachers and administrators.
So yes, I'm glad they asked that question,
because they are critical element of that training environment.
Absolutely. I want to ask one final question.
And that is: What do you see as the future for this program,
this training tool, what would you like to see it accomplish?
Or how would like to see it grow?
So I think we've had this discussion, one of things
I think we would like to be able to put this up on a cloud-based server,
that would really enhance the user experience.
I think we would really like to see this grow
out into like "Any City" or "Any Town" USA
so we could have multiple environments
that we can go in and use in there, and then
Yes, we would also like to build the architecture.
So the other people if they have a training scenario
that they want to add, they can build it themselves.
Make it so that there's easy scenario generation tools
you can place entities, you can create the scenario
and and let people move off on it, on their own. So they don't need us.
Our goal is to move ourselves out of a job and
let those end-users be the people that can, that can
push this forward and also to make those tools available to people who are,
they don't have to be as advanced developers as Cole engineering,
maybe they could be semi- skilled and be able to create these scenarios.
That's where we like to see.
If anyone needs help we'd be more than happy to help out [laughter]
We're actually discussing the concept of establishing like a governance board
Oh, OK
to continue the development of this.
As Tammy said, in government, cause we're R&D, you know eventually
we want to work ourselves out of this position
and then work people into their own sustainment.
So, it's really turning it over to the users and saying this is yours,
use it how you need to, build what you need.
Exactly.
Great! Well thank you all so much for joining me today.
Thank you all for tuning in and
we will will see you for our next Tech talk.