Bringing Virtual Reality Into Law Enforcement

00:04
Brent Hinson
Between the lines with Virtual Academy. We all have a story to tell. Welcome to another edition of between the Lines with Virtual Academy. We’re a podcast going beyond the bats to allow members of law enforcement public safety and first response a place to tell their stories and also talk about the cases that have impacted their lives. I’m your co host, Brent Henson, and as we plan out these episodes, we try to find guests who can not only tell stories, but also share information from a number of different angles, even on topics that I don’t fully understand yet. Such is the case today because we’re going to welcome a guest who is the president of a company specializing interactive 3D technology, augmented reality, and virtual reality, something that can be utilized for better preparedness in a variety of situations. But before we bring our guest in, allow me to not only introduce our host, Mr.

01:03
Brent Hinson
Michael Warren, but also in a rare appearance, our executive producer Aaron Bevel is on the podcast today. Welcome, gentlemen.

01:12
Aaron Bevill
Full house today.

01:13
Michael Warren
That’s right, buddy. We’re filling the screen up. That’s how we roll.

01:16
Brent Hinson
Now. We had to bring Aaron in. This is something so before we get kind of going, this is a space that you know more than I do.

01:24
Aaron Bevill
VR has been kind of a hobby of mine for a while, and mostly in gaming and things like that. But we’ve also looked into it at Virtual Academy a few different ways and kind of just try to understand the technology. I think it’s a really interesting place for law enforcement to look at for training because there are certain things that you can train in person, but you can’t get the full experience until you’re and it sounds like it might can correct me, but oftentimes a lot of these officers, the first time they experience some of these situations is when it’s happening. And that’s not the best way to train. Sometimes, having that virtual reality, you can kind of experience some of those things and hopefully get some of that muscle memory built in.

02:01
Michael Warren
Well, in the training world, we talk about building file folders, and file folders are appropriate responses for different situations that they encounter, and this is one of the tools that probably is underutilized. Before we go further, Brent, I need to ask a question here. That little intro that you gave about not knowing a whole lot about something, did you get that verbiage from one of the reviews, one of our episodes? Because that seems to describe me a lot of times as we enter in these things.

02:31
Brent Hinson
I know lots of useless information as a former radio DJ, but actual solid information, not so much, I guess not.

02:38
Michael Warren
Only as a DJ, but also from Trivia Night, as we found out before went recording here.

02:43
Brent Hinson
Came in second Monday night.

02:45
Michael Warren
There we go. So why don’t you go ahead and tell us about our guest, and let’s bring him on and see what he’s got to tell us today.

02:50
Brent Hinson
All right, as I mentioned earlier, our guest today is currently the president of Visitech USA. But for 38 years, he served in the US. Army before retiring as Brigadier General in 2010. He’s been awarded the Legion of Merit Medal five times, the Army Commendation Medal seven times, and numerous other awards. He earned several awards for excellence for his units and commands due to his focus on experimental learning and adding virtual problem based learning to the army training program, something that eventually became the catalyst for his current venture, Visiteech USA. It is our honor to welcome retired Brigadier General Stuart Roadhiver to the podcast. It’s an honor and a pleasure to have you on today, sir.

03:36
Stewart Rodeheaver
Well, thank you very much, guys. It’s my privilege. I appreciate you taking time to let me join and interact with your group.

03:42
Michael Warren
Well, it’s interesting how we met, though, because we met at Aylita and we referred back to Aylita many times on this podcast, but Aylita is a great organization and a great conference, and were able to run into you there, and you certainly piqued our interest. Was that your first time at Ilita?

04:02
Stewart Rodeheaver
It was, and law enforcement training and education is a new venture. As part of my company. We’ve been in business 15 years doing this, and before that, I did it for the army, but this was our first venture into the law enforcement side, and we’re trying to get to know the people, trying to get to know the protocols, and that was a good place for us to get started.

04:23
Michael Warren
It really is a great organization with a lot of people that have servant hearts. But before we start the conversation about what you’re doing now, we probably should start it with what led up to it, how you came to be in this space. And I’m going to go ahead and tell you, this is only the second time in my life that I have talked to a general. Okay, I’m just throwing it out there. I talked to one before when I graduated from PLDC, I was the distinguished Honor graduate and came up and gave me my very first challenge coin. It’s been a long time since that happened, so if I flub it up, we’ve talked about it on the program before. I’m willing to do push ups out there.

05:07
Stewart Rodeheaver
Right. All right, well, no push ups today. No push ups today.

05:11
Michael Warren
I appreciate that because I’m a heck of a lot older when I did it.

05:14
Stewart Rodeheaver
Then again, I appreciate the opportunity to just kind of talk. I was in the army for a long time. We went through a lot of different iterations on how to train people and how to get the best out of people in critical situations. In 2004, five and six, I was part of Third Infantry Division and part of 18th Airborne Corps. When went in and occupied Baghdad and southern Iraq. We were there for a good 18 months, most of it in combat and then some in the humanitarian side. But about halfway through it, my Four Star commander came to me and said, look, we got a problem with these new recruits that we’re training, that we’re recruiting. These young folks just aren’t listening to old folks like me and you anymore, and they don’t read like they used to. We need to find out how to train these people better.

06:03
Stewart Rodeheaver
And he Four Star tapped me in the chest and said, you need to fix this. So when a Four Star taps, a One Star in the chest said, you need to fix this, then you start looking about, how do you get this done? So we had thousands and thousands of soldiers in Iraq and then more on the way. So were able to start doing some surveys and said, how do you like to learn? All the young soldiers that we interviewed said, we really don’t like to just read that much, and we really don’t like to have an old guy like you stand on the stage and talk to us, but we like for it to be interactive, make it like a game, virtual augmented reality. They went on and on about the interactive. Part of being involved and immersed into a situation was the way they like to learn.

06:46
Stewart Rodeheaver
So I made a big mistake. I wrote a paper for the army, and you know, if you ever write it down, it’ll come back and haunt you. So I wrote a paper and I titled it Screen Agers. I said that the people that we’re now recruiting are three screen learners. They learn off a cell phone, a laptop and a telephone, and if we don’t reach them that way, we’re not going to teach them the way we want to. So they allowed me to start trying that. While were in Iraq in 2004, five and six, I had no background in AR, VR, or interactive 3D. All my army time had been combat training. First jungle training and then desert training. As the possibilities and the enemy changed, I had to kick back and say, okay, how do I go about eating this elephant here? So luckily, the army was really involved in the start of the internet, so we had put in a good Internet system over there.

07:39
Stewart Rodeheaver
So I got on the Internet and I started looking, and I found a scientist in Atlanta. That was his specialty, was AR and VR. He was one of the ones that who had done some of the early testing for the Air Force, and at the time he worked for George Lucas films. I called him from Iraq, and it was quite an interesting phone call when I said, this is General Reaver from I’m in Baghdad, Iraq, and I need to talk to you about this. And he said, is this my brother? We went through that kind of thing first, and after I convinced him what it was, I explained it to him, I need to see if you can help me if we try to do some of this. Can you do that? So he agreed to help. We built some programs to help train the soldiers quicker on pieces of equipment that were getting that we really didn’t have time to put them through a long school.

08:27
Stewart Rodeheaver
And we found out that we could train them much faster, and they learned much quicker if we gave it to them the way they wanted to learn, if we reached them where they wanted to learn. So it really helped us while were there. When I left Iraq, I came back to the United States and I was the deputy commanding general for the United States Guam, Puerto Rico as the Depco first army. And were training people all over the United States and all over Guam and Puerto Rico. And my commander at the time said, look, we really like what you did over in Iraq. Will you put it in here and see how it works? And I continued to work with the scientists I had reached out to. We were very successful. It made some huge changes, not just in how quickly people learn, but the in depth way that they were able to grasp real technical problems or real strategic problems.

09:17
Stewart Rodeheaver
They could see them, and because they could see them and visualize them or be in the middle of them, they learn them quickly. And then even the ones who are things that you consider to be hands on, things like mechanics, doctors, medical people, all those, could put their hands in the middle of these things and do them. And the learning just went up exponentially. So were very successful there, and it kind of grew from there.

09:41
Michael Warren
If I could, you enlisted before you became an officer, correct?

09:46
Stewart Rodeheaver
I did. I was enlisted for six years.

09:48
Michael Warren
And then not to try and call you out or anything, but what year did you enlist?

09:54
Stewart Rodeheaver
Okay.

09:54
Michael Warren
And the reason why I asked that is because people that have been involved with the military for the length of time that you have, my guess is there wasn’t a lot of virtual reality training going on when you were an enlisted person.

10:11
Stewart Rodeheaver
There was none. If you want hands on training, you’re going to do it with a piece of equipment or with another person. There was no computer training. I remember the first time they came to me and said, we’re going to put a computer into your company. Here’s a box of punch cards, and here’s a little pin. You got to punch these little tabs out, and then we’ll run them through the computer and it’ll pin a program. And then from there we’ll be able to allocate equipment. And we never got the punch cards right. It took forever to get them done. And by the time we got them right, we’d drop them and then we’d have to pick up and start all over again.

10:46
Michael Warren
The reason I bring that up is because you remember the movie War Games?

10:51
Stewart Rodeheaver
Oh, yeah.

10:52
Michael Warren
And I can remember I wasn’t as old as you, but I can remember that. But I remember how advanced I thought that stuff looked at that time. And it’s this two dimensional representations, very poor representations on a screen. But people were blown away by the technology and really that drove a lot of the interest that my generation had in computers and that type thing, but pales in comparison to what’s out there now. I just did the math in my head. That was about 40 years ago that movie came out and the advances that have been made now I have to bring something up here real quick. You went to Mercer?

11:37
Stewart Rodeheaver
I did.

11:38
Michael Warren
Why did you choose Mercer?

11:40
Stewart Rodeheaver
Well, Mercer is a big university here in middle Georgia. It’s just a few miles from where I lived and grew up. My family was stationary in Middle Georgia while I was going through training. But I went to college kind of the 15 year plan because I would go to college for a couple of quarters and I’d be gone for a couple of quarters and I’d come back and go for a quarter, be gone for a year. It just took me a long time. So because as it was centrally located, it was easy to do. And MRSA was very good to work with me for my time traveling and all.

12:11
Michael Warren
Now see, I’m going to throw something out there at you. I was originally from Macon.

12:15
Stewart Rodeheaver
Oh, me too.

12:17
Michael Warren
That’s where I was born.

12:18
Stewart Rodeheaver
Okay.

12:18
Michael Warren
And that’s where I spent the bulk of my time up until my 9th grade year. And my mom still lives down there. And I’m going to guess you might know where it’s at. She’s in a little town called Montrose, just outside Dublin.

12:33
Stewart Rodeheaver
Yeah, I know exactly where it is.

12:35
Michael Warren
Mercer Bears, right? Mercer Bears, yeah, because that was in the NCAA tournament. Mercer came real close being the number 16 seed beating number one seed Oklahoma back in the day. But that was a long time ago.

12:47
Stewart Rodeheaver
It amazed all of us. Well, now they’ve got a great football team that’s doing really well, and their sports teams have really grown, but they’re really known for their medical school, their law school and software, and their computer science programs. My degree was in business management and then international business. That’s what my degree is. Ran.

13:09
Michael Warren
Now where did you get your commission from then?

13:11
Stewart Rodeheaver
I went to OCS. Okay, I’ll tell you a quick, fast story about how I went to OCS. This was right at the end of Vietnam, so I was a Fort Benning in the barracks there. They were dismissing you could get Coca Cola as a coca Cola machine and all that, but it also had Budweiser. So all the Vietnam vets who were coming back, they were all looking at the end of the day, they were looking for beer, so they wanted to make sure there was beer in the machine. So we had a couple of guys who had been to Vietnam and come back, and they were not really good about staying sober all day long. That’s as tackled as I can put it. And my sergeant major came by one morning, and he said, Road, heaver come here. I walked over. He said, look, we have an inspection this afternoon.

14:00
Stewart Rodeheaver
The colonel is coming by, and I want you to make sure that Smith and Taylor are sober at the formation this afternoon so that they don’t embarrass us in front of the colonel. I said, yes, Sergeant Major. Just like a good buck sergeant is supposed to do. And then I set about trying to do that, and it was two against one, so they would keep me occupied. One slip off, one slip off. By the end of the day, they were pretty well on the way to being inebriated. We had the formation. The colonel came by. They were cool. He went right by, never said a word, didn’t say anything, so I thought were okay. At the end of it, sergeant major called me out front. He said rodeo Front center. I popped out front and stood there. He said, Stand there. Don’t move. He walked in the order of the room, and he came back and he had a fistful of papers in his hand, and he put them in my chest.

14:50
Stewart Rodeheaver
He said, Take those, fill them out, and have them back to me by tomorrow. I said, yes, Sergeant Major. What are these? He said, It’s an application for OCS because you’re not going to make it as an NCO.

15:01
Michael Warren
Career counseling, army style.

15:03
Stewart Rodeheaver
That’s what I army style career counseling. Right on the spot, just like that with OCS.

15:09
Michael Warren
You said that you were there because your parents were there in Middle Georgia.

15:13
Stewart Rodeheaver
Yeah, this is the home for my family. We grew up around here, between Macon and Versailles. There’s a little town called Juliet, Georgia. If you ever saw the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, it’s where the whistle stop cafe is. And so we grew up right there on the farm, right outside of Juliet.

15:32
Michael Warren
I told the story before on the podcast. Robbins Air Force Base is the reason why I exist, because my dad was from Indiana, but that’s where he was stationed. He met my mom.

15:41
Stewart Rodeheaver
Yeah, that happens to a lot of.

15:43
Michael Warren
Folks going through, though. You get your commission, and now you start in this profession. You’re one of the people that enlisted people really enjoyed because you came from the enlisted ranks and became an officer, so you knew what that life was like. It really struck me just a minute ago when you were talking about being in Iraq and recognizing that the young folks weren’t prepared as well as they should be prepared for what they were going to face. But what really struck me was the fact that you didn’t just recognize the problem you set about, albeit with a four star telling you to, but you set about trying to find a solution for the problem. I guess what I’m kind of looking for is what was the seed that was planted in your mind that, you know what, maybe this virtual reality thing is, because I could have done the same survey you did, but I wouldn’t have come up with, hey, you know what?

16:42
Michael Warren
Virtual reality, that’s where we need to go. What started that?

16:46
Stewart Rodeheaver
The seed for it really came when we got back to I was able to go back to Fort Wachuka. Out in Arizona at the Intel School, were trying to solve a problem. The problem the school had was they had a very specific piece of equipment they needed to teach a bunch of soldiers how to use, but they only had ten pieces of that equipment. And they said, we’re sending nine of them overseas. We’re going to have one set here train people on. So we’re going to have a classroom throughput of about 20 people every six weeks. We need to fix that. Can you fix that? Can you help with that? So again, I called my scientist friend and said, look, we need to do this. Can you help me figure out a way to do this? So he and I drew out and built an interactive 3D generator.

17:34
Stewart Rodeheaver
It was a special type of generator, and once we built that, then instead of having to keep one of the live ones at Fort Wachuka, we could take that and replicate it in as many classrooms as we wanted to. So we replicated it into ten classrooms, each with a throughput of 20 people. And were able to increase the throughput every six weeks from 200 people, I mean, from 20 people to about 200 people, just because we had virtual equipment to work with. And they tested out higher scores than they were testing out on the real piece of equipment. Because a lot of times the people on real piece of equipment are standing there looking over somebody’s shoulder while they’re down there working on a wire or pushing a button or doing whatever it is they’re doing. But on the virtual reality or the 3D side, each one of them had their own piece of equipment they could work with.

18:22
Stewart Rodeheaver
They could put their hands in the middle of it. The classes went very quickly. We were able to take a six week class, cut it down to a three and a half week class, and they were testing out 40% to 60% higher. After we ran the first class and I did the scores and checked, and I said, this is it, this is the way the change is going to hit. And so we started doing that.

18:44
Michael Warren
There’s a concept out there in the education training world, the concept of accelerated expertise. What you had just talked about there was that it wasn’t just a matter of increasing the number of people trained, it was also about increasing their abilities with the equipment, but in the shorter amount of time. In my opinion, that’s an example of the accelerated expertise. Maybe your experience was different, but there was a study that was done back in the 50s in Great Britain where they had changed up the training on this piece of postal equipment. And even the students thought that the ones that did it the old way would better able to run the piece of equipment after training was over with. But when they tried out these new things, it turns out that the changes produced better results. I would be interested to know the first group that you ran through, hey, listen, I’m a hands on person, I need to be able touch the machine.

19:49
Michael Warren
I would bet that there were some, even students, that didn’t think that the quality of the education, the quality of training would be the same because it was being done in a 3D virtual type format.

20:00
Stewart Rodeheaver
Yeah, a lot of them said, hey, look, I’m an old soldier, I need to have my hands on the piece of equipment if you want me to learn it. We worked them through that, but the truth in the pudding came after they had been through the training and left and went into country. And we followed up with them and I said, how did you feel when you first got there and you put your hands on the piece of equipment? They said, It did not feel like the first time I’d ever had my hands on the equipment because of the way you all trained us. That really set the tone, saying it does make a difference because they were able to learn more, learn at a higher rate, learn quicker, and they still had the same feel of being immersed in a hands on piece of equipment and been able to learn and work with.

20:45
Michael Warren
I am interested in the idea that the fact that your assessment went beyond the test that was given in order for them to graduate from the school and you went to see how it applied in the real world. Did you find it wasn’t anomaly that they were better prepared that way than they had with the hands on?

21:09
Stewart Rodeheaver
We were surprised by the reports from their supervisors that came back to us and said this soldier was more ready to go into combat operations than the previous soldiers we get because of the training he got before he got here. Again, that was a telling point to us that they were learning well enough with the virtual equipment that when they got to the combat zone. People on the ground were saying, These guys are ready to go. And they didn’t have to say, okay, we got to do some remedial training and do this, because they had already been trained. They knew where the switch was going to be. They knew when you pushed this button what was going to happen. They knew all those things, and it saved a tremendous amount of time and effort over there so you could worry more about what soldiers are supposed to do, which is protect and do all the things and secure and do all things you’re supposed to do.

22:05
Stewart Rodeheaver
Instead of which switch turns on this, which switch makes this go? Just the different parts of how it ran. So were really pleased and surprised by the reports we got back from the supervisors of the soldiers who had been trained. Interactive three D and virtual reality.

22:22
Michael Warren
You recognize that this system is going to work, and we’ve tested it in this one area. At what point did it expand to other areas to say, hey, does this transfer to other disciplines, to other skills?

22:36
Stewart Rodeheaver
Well, when I came back from Iraq and was a Depco for First Army, my commander there was a guy named Russ Honoree. If you remember Katrina, the big Cajun general that went in after Katrina, that’s Russ Honoree. He was my boss at First Army, and he sat down with me one day, and he said he had seen what we had done overseas, and he said, I don’t know how to put that into the army, but you need to put it into our training program. So we sat down with the First Army training program and said, where can we put virtual training in all these places and save time, equipment and money? What can we do with what we’ve been training? How can we save this and turn out better officers, better NCOs, better people to do what they’re supposed to do? So went through that, and we created an electronic soldiers workbook.

23:24
Stewart Rodeheaver
Before, if you went in the army, you got these big stacks of books. If you want to know about it, you had to find your way through all those stacks of books. Well, we narrowed it down to one DVD. On that DVD, you could go through several things virtually, and it increased your knowledge or base knowledge tremendously quick, and again, saves a lot of time and a lot of money and effort by getting you ready quicker. When we did that, it went from what were doing in Iraq being something that we did at First Army, to being recognized by units saying, hey, look, this is working. And the guys who trained under First Army were going back to their units and saying, I didn’t have to do this over there because they had a virtual machine, and I was able to do this and this.

24:07
Stewart Rodeheaver
And I put my hands in it, and I know what we’re doing. And it just started spreading.

24:11
Michael Warren
Did you find that the people that were most resistant to the concept were the older, more experienced soldiers as opposed to the younger ones that you had surveyed during your initial time there?

24:25
Stewart Rodeheaver
The army is just like any organization. It’s a pyramid. And the people at the top are the ones who’ve been there the longest or have some particular reason that they’re at the top. But the ones who come in at the lowest, the youngest ones, changed before the influx of the personal computer. That pyramid was correct because the older people had more knowledge, they had more experience, they knew how to do it. But now they had more age and more experience, but they didn’t have more knowledge because all of a sudden, a newcomer is coming into the army who’s been playing video games all his life and knows how to run. A computer and all that can run the new piece of equipment that the old sergeant or old Sergeant major doesn’t know how to run. So the influx of the personal computer in the mid 70s started changing that pyramid, and it started flattening out a lot.

25:17
Stewart Rodeheaver
So when you did that, you started seeing older soldiers who had been against it to start with, saying, wait a minute, these guys are much better prepared than the ones we had before. First thing is I got to step up my game so I better understand what they’re doing. And secondly is I need to look at all that additional knowledge they bring into the fight. How can I leverage that now as a force multiplier to make my unit better? When that started hitting, people started realizing that you saw even the people who were resistant to it in the early 80s started saying, wait, this is the thing of the future. This is going to change.

25:53
Aaron Bevill
It pains me to say this as somebody who grew up in the Air Force, my dad was in the Air Force, but the army has always been, it seems, ahead of the game when it comes to using new technology to train people and to recruit people. Remember the mid 2000s? They saw a lot of young adults playing Call of Duty. They released a game and developed a game called America’s Army. Playing that game, I remember knowing people that played that game that then went and were recruited into the army. So it’s one of those interesting things where they took the technology that they saw, like you said, that kids were involved in and then kind of played off of that and said, hey, you like this. This is the real world example of that. So you see that time and time again. And so the jump to VR, it kind of makes a lot of sense.

26:38
Stewart Rodeheaver
Well, the army is fully on board with AR, VR, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and several other things. Now, some of. The things they do amaze me. It amazes me every day, and I look at it every day, so I’m real proud of both. All the armed services are doing it. The air force has got some very high tech programs and simulators and things that they work with. As much as we pick the air force and all, we think they’re good people, too. Around marines, we talk a little slower just to give them a chance to catch up.

27:09
Michael Warren
But other than that listen, I say this a lot in classes and everything. What do you call a marine with an IQ of 160?

27:15
Stewart Rodeheaver
Army guy.

27:16
Michael Warren
A platoon.

27:17
Stewart Rodeheaver
A platoon. All right.

27:20
Michael Warren
We just lost one listener.

27:21
Stewart Rodeheaver
Yeah, we did. Okay. I apologize to the marines. I love you all. You win the uniform war for sure.

27:27
Michael Warren
But it’s one of those things where right now in law enforcement okay, and it’s a great point by Aaron, right now in law enforcement, there’s a recruiting and retention issue. Some would even go so far as to call it a crisis, and yet we still are trying to recruit and retain people with the same old tools that we used 2030 years ago, where the army, they saw this shift, and so therefore, their game plan shifted in order. And the stuff that you talked about, the shift that was done there, it was done not only for the benefit of the army, but for the benefit of the soldiers because it helped them to make better decisions. They were better prepared to deal with things, especially under stress, and they were there in a much quicker way so that there wasn’t that steep learning curve that you often get from a brand new person coming into a new environment.

28:19
Michael Warren
At some point, you get out of the army, and you start thinking about using that same type of training, that same type of technology to train law enforcement. What was it that drove you to the law enforcement community saying, you know what? These folks, I think, will benefit from it?

28:36
Stewart Rodeheaver
After I finished my tour of first army, I retired from the army and came home and started this business because the army asked me to. They said, we like what you were doing, but we don’t want to do it. Will you help us build some more things? So I hired that scientist that I had been building stuff for the army. I hired him, and he went to work for me, and we started building programs just for the department of defense to start with. And then we started branching out because we got so many calls from schools and from school teachers saying, look, my husband said he took a tank apart in the classroom in 3D, I’m a physics teacher, or I’m a biology teacher. What can you do for us? So, between our third and fourth year in business, we hired a bunch of teachers during the summer, and we wrote 3500 programs for K through twelve schools.

29:21
Stewart Rodeheaver
And we’re in 2000 schools now, across the bottom 22 states and growing every day. And we did that because we got a call saying, hey, what can you do for me? What can you do for me? Same kind of thing happened with us in law enforcement. We started getting calls from people said, look, I’m a policeman, I’m a fireman, I’m a medic, I’m an EMT. Is there anything you can do? And then we started getting calls from schools who taught firemen and taught medics and taught things. So our first really step into this came from a school down in Savannah, Georgia. We got a call from them, said, look, we teach forensic science here, we teach CSI programs, and we have a problem. During a whole semester, we can only do one crime scene because it costs so much to build it and it takes so long.

30:08
Stewart Rodeheaver
We can only do one crime scene, and we feel like the folks are graduating with only going through one crime scene, and that’s not enough. So help us fix this. So we built an interactive virtual reality program that when you put on a helmet in the air, there’s a menu, and you can select one of ten crime scenes, and you can select one of 30 crimes, and it’ll build you a matrix of the different crimes. So now you can build about 46 to 47 different problems that a CSI or a forensic science going into a crime scene has to face. You can put on a helmet, I can put you in an alley where there was a knife fight, I can put you in a bar where there was a gunfight, a home where there’s a domestic problem, and just on and on like that.

30:54
Stewart Rodeheaver
And each of them have evidence there, they have blood spatter, all those kind of things that you have to go through. And so now in that same school, instead of one crime scene in eleven weeks, they go through about eight crime scenes and go through the process of assessing and figuring out the crime, figuring out the evidence and all those things before they get out of school. So it really raised the bar for them. And then again, because people started seeing our CSI, they asked us if we could do other things. So we’ve done other programs. Like we’ve made virtual cadavers for EMTs. We call it the biggest mouse pad in the world. It’s two and a half feet wide by 6ft long. We imprinted an electronic body on it. And if you download our app, when you look at the body, the cadaver will come up out of your phone, and then you can actually operate on the cadaver just like you would a real cadaver.

31:45
Brent Hinson
Well, how long does it take you to develop these programs from start to finish?

31:50
Stewart Rodeheaver
Some of them are three to four months, some of them are six to eight months. It just depends on how big the program is. We did one for the Navy. The Navy asked us to help teach people how to work on an aircraft carrier. So they parked an aircraft carrier up at Norfolk Bay and gave us access, and we modeled it, and we built them an aircraft carrier in virtual reality so that you can walk through everything on the aircraft carrier. You can pre flight an F 18. You can change out the engines if you want to. That one took about eight months because there’s a lot of things there, but most of them six to eight months things about the two there.

32:24
Michael Warren
As long as that took, it’s still considerably shorter time and certainly much cheaper to build it in that fashion than it is to actually build an aircraft carrier that’s just going to sit there and dock that you’re going to take and train people on.

32:39
Stewart Rodeheaver
Well, to park an aircraft carrier, they told me to park an aircraft carrier is about $2 million a day, and so we can’t afford to park an aircraft carrier, teach people. So we generally walk them through programs in a vacant building and say, this is what it’s like. And here would be this said, it’s not the same, but ours, the way we map things is accurate within about a quarter of an inch. So when they go on the aircraft carrier, if you see a fire extinguisher or something, it’s really there. So that’s why we did it.

33:10
Michael Warren
I want to talk about the CSI school for a second.

33:12
Stewart Rodeheaver
Okay.

33:13
Michael Warren
I would love to know what the student response was after that had been developed, because they had to know going in that the people before us, they get to do one crime scene.

33:25
Stewart Rodeheaver
Yeah.

33:26
Michael Warren
And after that one crime scene, we’re going to kick you out on your own, and you got to go find employment and do your what was the student response to it?

33:33
Stewart Rodeheaver
Well, some of the students, to start with, said, wait a minute, we got to do eight. They only had to do one. But then after they got to do them, they said, this is fun, and I’m better prepared than they are. So that became a kind of a cutting point for the school to say, well, these people were trained before this CSI program, and these people were trained after the CSI program. They have more experience going through CSI programs than the ones who graduated before. So it’s pretty funny watching them compete about, well, I graduated in this year, and you graduated this year. But the law enforcement things that we get into and have gotten into have been because we’ve been asked to. And the current one we’re working on is response to an active shooter program. That’s a big problem everywhere in the US.

34:17
Stewart Rodeheaver
Everywhere in the world, really, but everywhere in the US. And we’ve had so many requests. They said, Is there anything you can do in that field to help us. Well, what we looked at was most of the police forces that we saw that were training on active shooter programs were training in either their training rooms, their training centers, or in vacant buildings. There were no people there to really stress them on how to do this. So what we chose to do was to one of the schools that we work with on our other VR programs for their classes. I talked their superintendent into letting us have their school, their high school, over the Christmas holidays this past year. So we flew drones throughout the building. We went in with photographers. We took pictures and mapped the whole building and put it into a virtual reality headset.

35:07
Stewart Rodeheaver
And then went back through and instead of just having the vacant building, we put virtual people in, the virtual students in there, each with a different personality, so that some of them, if the policeman goes in and says you and you follow me. Some of them will follow them, but some of them will lay down on the floor and cry. And some will run the other way to help create stress on the policeman. We are about halfway through finishing that program now, so it should be ready here. We’re looking at maybe end of July, 1 August, as far as fully functional. But when we map that school again, it’s accurate within a quarter of an inch. When we go through the front door and turn right in this particular school, there’s a big glass trophy case there. When I put that helmet on and I go through those double doors and I turn right, I expect to see that case there, and it’s there.

35:58
Stewart Rodeheaver
So if someone who’s never been to school before puts this on and trains in it and then goes to the real school, it will feel just like they’ve been there before. It puts a lot of stress into a familiar zone for them so that it helps them train better.

36:14
Michael Warren
And that’s the whole idea behind training, is that when you encounter it the first time, if training is done properly, it should feel like I’ve been there before.

36:23
Stewart Rodeheaver
You don’t want it to be a learning experience your first time through.

36:25
Michael Warren
I liked how you talked about the active shooter training, what it typically took place in abandoned buildings. You might get to use a school on summer vacation when no students are there. That has to be a lot like what they used to do with the aircraft carrier training that you were talking about. You try to simulate it in these empty rooms in a building, but it’s not the same as actually walking through and seeing it.

36:50
Stewart Rodeheaver
No. And on our aircraft, if you walk out to the edge, you look over, you see the ocean, and it’s down there, and you realize how big an aircraft carrier is, and you get all those feels well. In the schools you do the same thing a lot of times in a vacant building it’s miniaturized because you’re trying to keep them within a confined space. But on ours, if you have to go down a 100 foot hallway, you have to go down 100 foot hallway in your helmet. You have to transport yourself all the way down to the end of the hall to be able to get to where you want to go. So it takes time. So we’re doing that for the teams that are going inside the buildings. And then we’re building a management training program for the teams that are outside managing. They can see what’s on the body cams of the policeman going in.

37:34
Stewart Rodeheaver
So on our program they can see what they are seeing through their VR helmets. So that way they can look and say, okay, I see what you’re seeing. Yes, I see this and yes, I see the shooter and those kind of things and it’s all recorded and we can do it. So that end up we do an after action review. We can go through and say, okay, right here, what did you tell them to do? And the sergeant or deputy can say, well I said do this and this. And we can say, well let’s see if that’s what you said. Push the button and it’ll play back and we can compare and say okay, what do you think now? Well maybe I should have said this and this. And it just is a better learning experience because we can create that immediate feedback, positive way so everybody understands we’re all here to get better.

38:18
Stewart Rodeheaver
The tests that we run people through when we put the virtual children in there and then virtual parents showed up at the door, some with their telephones and some with their own guns and then the press shows up, the police start sweating the people going through. They say this is a lot of emotion I didn’t have to deal with before. And it’s been a good training program, but we’re just about through with it.

38:40
Aaron Bevill
Do you have any issues with people getting sick in VR? I know it’s one of the big stumbling blocks to VR with just common users. When you’re moving, do you actually move in the spaces and walk in the space? Do you use the controller to walk in the space?

38:53
Stewart Rodeheaver
Well, you use the controller to walk in the space. You can move around inside of the area that you define. And then ours has an electronic wall. When you get to the edge, you’ll see an electronic grid come up. If you step through the grid, then you can see the people. So you know not to run into things at all. Got you. But when you back up through the grid, then you’re back in the virtual environment and it makes it a little easier so you don’t stumble around and run into the wall, those kind of things. But what it does do, if you don’t actually make the moves to move down the hall, then you won’t move. Got you. So it makes them go through that process. We hadn’t had anybody get sick in virtual reality. When we first started doing interactive 3D. We had some people that got headaches every now and then, but went through and my scientist is really good.

39:38
Stewart Rodeheaver
They went through a big program with the doctors, and they changed some of the way that we did the visual cognition between the two eyes. And by doing that, we hadn’t had a problem in years with that.

39:51
Michael Warren
NASA a couple of years ago, I was doing some training at NYPD’s counterterrorism Division, okay? And at the end of the day, my host said, hey, you know what? We’ve got a boat simulator back here in the back. You want to give a shot? I’m like well, yes, I do. We go in this thing. Hey, just so you know, we just dropped about half a million dollars in software upgrades. And so you get into the pilot house, right? Normally, we operate this with three crew, but you can do it yourself. And they close that door, and it’s like, literally 360 degrees, and I don’t have a helmet on. I’m telling you, the skyline looked just exactly like that. And so he gave me a mission, and I’ve got the map. Well, I didn’t know what it was, but when I got there, it was Sully’s plane.

40:38
Michael Warren
I pulled up, and there’s the jet on the Hudson. But after he shut it down, man, I’m sitting there going, Well, I just figured something out. I’d never make it in the Navy because I’m a little bit seasick right now. But point is, realistic training provides the best outcome from our people. It should be stressful. Not for the sake of stress, but for the sake of understanding. If you’ve watched any of those videos of people doing the VR stuff and they’re going through, like, the Jurassic Park and they fall down and stuff like that, it shows how immersive, I think, is the word that I’m looking for training can be. And that in a training environment, that has to be incredibly valuable.

41:25
Stewart Rodeheaver
It is extremely valuable. And one of the things that we did when I was the senior instructor after I graduated from OCS, I went back as a senior instructor, senior TAC officer, if you want. This is what some of them call us. We had to create as much stress as possible and then ask the students to make decisions to be able to gauge what they were going to do when bullets start flying. And that’s one of the things that you can’t do if you’re training a vacant building. If you don’t put them in a high stress environment so that you understand if bullets are flying and the place is on fire and people are screaming and hollering, how are they going to react then? The first time they go into a scene will be their learning experience, and you will not be able to gauge what they’re going to be able to do.

42:12
Michael Warren
There’s two real types of stress. There’s the stress of the danger that you’re involved in, but there’s also the stress that comes from not knowing what the heck I’m doing. And the training is what solves that type of stress, which allows you to deal properly with the other stress, the dangerous situation.

42:31
Stewart Rodeheaver
It does. And then we’re trying to take out another stress point, which is going into an unknown place. So, like, for these communities we’re working with, we are able to film either a school, their courthouse, a Walmart or Target, or a big building like that, and then a large home so that we can say, okay, here are places that you may go. And we let them identify where their critical points are. And they say, this is where we have one of the biggest problems. Like one of the sheriff’s departments that saw us out there has asked us to look at filming their courthouse because that’s what they consider to be one of the danger points in their community. So we’re in the process of working out that deal to go in and film their courthouse. And they’ve almost agreed, but they’re saying, okay, we can give it to you Friday afternoon to Monday morning.

43:21
Stewart Rodeheaver
And then what we’ll do is over the weekend, we’ll put cruise in there day and night, we’ll film it and model it when we walk out Monday. It takes us about six weeks, but we’ll have a full BR model of that courthouse. And from there they can go to the courtrooms, they can go down to the jail cells, they can go to the transport tunnel. So they can now train inside of that courthouse every day, even though they can’t really get in the courthouse. And that takes away a lot of that stress of that unknown environment when you go into it. That’s really one of the things the biggest problems we found is they create stress is the unknown.

43:54
Michael Warren
You talked about the initial class where they could train 20 people at a time, and by doing this, they could do ten classes of 20 people at a time. If you talk about the courthouse, how many weekends is that agency going to need that courthouse in order to run all their people through the training?

44:11
Stewart Rodeheaver
Right, I agree.

44:12
Michael Warren
This right here, it allows them to do the training when it is feasible for the agency and not just restricted to the weekend. Because truth of the matter is, in law enforcement, weekend is one of your busiest times. It’s hard to do training on the weekends.

44:26
Stewart Rodeheaver
That’s right. And that’s one of the things that we think we can help with, is instead of them having to worry about how can I get into a place and train. We can give them a system says you train on your time, your dime, wherever way you want to. But when you do it’ll be absolutely realistic, stress producing, and it will give your policemen and your people a sense of accomplishment and a sense of familiarity that they have not had before.

44:53
Michael Warren
It’s funny how confidence begets competence and it’s this positive cycle. It’s not about breaking the person down, it’s about properly preparing them.

45:04
Stewart Rodeheaver
That’s correct.

45:05
Michael Warren
Well, if somebody wanted to find out more information about your company and about the products that you offer, how would they go about finding that out?

45:15
Stewart Rodeheaver
Well, our website is of course, the quickest way, and it’s real easy. It’s www.visiteechusa.com. And that’s ViziTech, Usa.com. Or another way is call me or send me an email. And my email is CSR. Three letters like Charlie, Sierra, Romeo@visiteechusa.com.

45:41
Brent Hinson
And you know what?

45:42
Stewart Rodeheaver
We’ve done.

45:42
Brent Hinson
We made it so easy. In our episode page for this episode, we’ve got links to all that stuff. So they can go there and find your YouTube channel is where they need to go because we’re talking about this. But they’ve got to see it. The CSI thing is incredible. We’re talking about it, but just to see somebody go through it, you’ve got to watch it. It’s incredible. So all those links right there on the episode page.

46:05
Stewart Rodeheaver
Well, I’ll tell you one of the things that if people go to the website or go to the YouTube pages, one of the things they’ll see that’ll show them you were talking about earlier, about being out there and the things that are so different than what it used to be. One of the things you’ll see on there is that one of the computers that I have right here, the ones that we put into all the schools we talked about, is on your desktop computer. If you’re going through EMT class and you’re studying the heart, if you pull up a picture of a heart, you can see it, but you can’t do a whole lot with it. On my desktop computer, I can call up a picture of a heart and I can take an electronic pen, I can reach into the computer to pull the heart out and hold it in my hand.

46:44
Stewart Rodeheaver
I can feel the heart beat. I can take it apart, look at the valves, look at the blood flow, put it back together when I’m finished with it, put it back in the computer. And that kind of interactive like that is what the army told me we had to create in order to make this work. So that’s what we are trying to accomplish with everything we do. We’ve done weapons systems, generators, a lot of medical things that are fully interactive like that. Even for maintenance people, we can take a car engine, pull it out of the computer while it’s running, and let it run here. And then you and I can take it apart in the air and work on it, and we finish with it, put it back in the computer. And I know that sounds space age or whatever you want to call it, but the scientist that I told you I hired, he worked for Lucasfilms, and he was one of the designers for Iron Man and for some of the other programs.

47:32
Stewart Rodeheaver
So when you see some of that stuff, we replicated some of the things that they were doing.

47:37
Michael Warren
Hey, Aaron. When he started explaining what he can do with the heart, you know what my mind immediately went to? What’s that Indiana Jones where that one scene where the guy reaches in and he pulls out the heart and he.

47:48
Stewart Rodeheaver
Can feel the heart beating.

47:50
Michael Warren
I’m sorry. General of my mind went to that’s.

47:54
Stewart Rodeheaver
Okay.

47:54
Michael Warren
It’s one of those things where I think about teaching weapon handling.

47:59
Stewart Rodeheaver
Yes.

48:00
Michael Warren
All the safety procedures that you have to go through to ensure that we don’t have a negligent discharge. When you’re teaching nomenclature, the weapon care for the weapon, how much safer would it be? Not just cheaper and matching what the student wants, but how much safer is it if we get them to go through that process initially in a virtual environment? It’s amazing to me, people that kind of poo this type of training. It’s never going to be as good as hands on and getting your hands dirty. They just don’t understand how the brain works.

48:35
Stewart Rodeheaver
That’s right. They really don’t.

48:36
Michael Warren
And in order to be a good trainer, you have to understand how people learn. That has to be your true specialty. And it sounds like that’s what your area of expertise is. You show it through the VR. This is fantastic, the fascinating stuff.

48:51
Aaron Bevill
VR is going to be a big deal, and I’ve been pretty passionate about it for a long time. But if you see somebody, the most fun thing you can do is hand VR headset to somebody else who’s never done it before and see the level of buy in that they have. I’ve seen people rip it off their head, run out of the room because a monster walked up to them. It’s transformative in a lot of ways. So I think there’s a lot of neat things that we’re going to be able to do with this. There’s also new ways that they’re doing it where you can add sensors to actual guns so that you’re holding the physical weapon in VR so that there’s that real tactile feel that you have in those muscle memories that you want to build. So a lot of exciting things coming.

49:31
Stewart Rodeheaver
On the program that we’re building. We can either attach sensors to your weapons, make sure everything’s clear, of course, or we have virtual reality weapons that we have here that we put together that you can hold that replicate an M, four or nine millimeter, whatever it is you want to, but they fit, the controller fits inside of them. So when you pull the trigger on the weapon, it actually pulls the trigger on the controller and it will move you around and do the things you’re supposed to do. So more and more it’s being adapted every day to make it more and more realistic. And our motto is changing the way America learns. And I think that’s exactly what VR is going to do. It’s going to change the way America learns for the next 20 years.

50:12
Michael Warren
I think that’s fantastic. So I’m going to put you on the spot if we ever make it down into that area. When I say we, I mean the folks here on this podcast. What would be the chances of us stopping by and seeing you and maybe getting a look firsthand at what you got?

50:28
Stewart Rodeheaver
We would love to have you. We always have something new going on here. We can show you lots of things we’re working on. Not only we would love to have you here, we’ll take you to the best places around to eat so we’ll get some good food when you come down.

50:39
Michael Warren
I want to say thank you for your service. First of all, my privilege an honorable thing that you did. Thank you for answering the call and thank you for being here today. I know Aaron especially has been looking forward to it. I think he’s pretty satisfied with it. Brent, I’m fascinated.

50:57
Brent Hinson
I was asking my son about this stuff last night because he’s 16. I’m like, I can’t wrap my head around this whole thing and this has been fascinating me to learn about this and I’m telling you guys, if you’re listening right now and you are like me and like can’t wrap your head around it, go to between thelansovirtualacademy.com click on this episode page. We’ve got YouTube links, we’ve got their website visiteechusa.com. You’re going to find all that stuff to get more information. It’s truly remarkable in general. Again, thank you so much for taking time to come on in and explain it to a layperson like myself.

51:31
Stewart Rodeheaver
My pleasure, guys. And I look forward to seeing you in the future. I really do. You now.