Officer De-escalation VR Training Utilizes VIVE Wrist Tracker

Axon uses HTC VIVE's VR tech to help educate officers in effective de-escalation methods. Axon's new VR Simulator Training provides immersive training to officers, helping them better protect both the lives of the citizens they’ve dedicated their careers to serving, and their own lives—by ensuring tense situations in the field don’t escalate.

Our new, innovative accessory— VIVE Wrist Tracker —allows officers to intuitively interact with objects in VR—such as TASER energy weapons—just like they would in real life. These realistic scenarios require real-time assessment and split-second decision-making that results in more effective training and better real-world outcomes.

Send your contact information and intended use case to one of our Enterprise Account Executives to see how VIVE Wrist tracker and VIVE Focus 3 can transform your training program, throughout multiple industries.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Dan O'Brien, General Manager Americas at HTC VIVE.

We're honored to work with a world-class company like Axon, which is making big strides towards safer outcomes between officers and the communities they serve.

Axon's mission is to make the bullet obsolete, and to ensure that interactions between law enforcement and civilians have positive outcomes.

Police are often the first responders to mental health calls, which can easily turn dangerous.

Studies have shown that up to 50% of police shootings involve people with mental illnesses.

Through better de-escalation training, we can ensure more of these situations have positive outcomes.

Axon uses virtual reality to help train officers on effective de-escalation methods.

What does this mean?

It gives officers the ability to protect both their own lives and the lives of the citizens they have dedicated their careers to serving.

This ensures tense situations in the field don't escalate to violence.

It's a noble mission, and we're proud to be part of it.

HTC is known for spearheading innovations.

We created the world's most advanced all-in-one virtual reality headset the VIVE Focus 3, high-precision external trackers, and more.

The VIVE Wrist Tracker is our new cutting-edge accessory, developed specifically with Axon's VR training solutions in mind.

Our Wrist Tracker is small and lightweight. It feels like wearing a watch.

Axon VR Simulator Training works together with the VIVE Wrist Tracker to bring safer law enforcement one step closer to reality.

VIVE Wrist Tracker allows for accurate hand-to-elbow tracking, which helps with immersion during training and lets you interact with objects like Taser energy weapons and training firearms naturally in VR, just like you would in real life.

Officers can now use the exact same objects in VR training sessions that they would in the field.

Whatever you do in the real world will be mirrored in the virtual world, even if your hands are overlapping like they would when you're holding a Taser.

The VIVE Focus 3 headset always tracks your hand position.

In fact, every current-gen Taser 7 is equipped with a "VR mode" that works seamlessly with the VIVE Focus 3 and the VIVE Wrist Tracker.

This makes VR training more natural and ultimately more effective.

When an officer puts on a VIVE Focus 3 headset and jumps into Axon’s Taser simulation training, they're teleported into a VR scenario, just like they'd see in the field.

For example, Axon's new VR simulation includes realistic virtual reality encounters with people suffering from schizophrenia, drug addiction, and more.

The scenes are convincing and realistic.

This invokes the natural systems in your body,  your fight or flight response to react the same way you would in real life.

That means effective muscle memory and training retention rates, which translates to better outcomes in the real world.

A study published by the National Training Laboratory found that retention rates for VR learning were 75% compared to only 5% for lecture-style learning.*

And PwC found that VR learners are 150% less distracted during training and 400% faster to complete their instruction.**

Faster training, with better focus and retention is a winning combination.

We're proud to be working together with Axon to help protect officers and civilians alike with effective VR training solutions.

Video statics source:
*Measuring Learning in the Moment: The KPIs of VR Training
**PWC VR Report: Seeing is Believing