Australian NSW Police already were heavily involved in using 3d-virtual environments not unlike those on display at the CeBIT show in Sydney.
NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione visited CeBIT to inspect new virtual reality 3D gaming technology that can be used to simulate mass flooding and other emergency events.
Virtual reality scenarios includes a simulation of all floors at Sydney’s Town Hall and can have a dual role of training police and emergency service personnel in reacting to simulated events and in decision making in real emergencies.
Mr Scipione said technologies on display at CeBIT may be in the research phase now, but within a very short period of time would be “operationally deployed in agencies just like mine”.
“The big thing that I take away from coming to these sort of trade shows is, the more we invest in these sort of technologies, the more we exploit the technologies, the better off we are as an organisation, but more importantly, the better off the communities are.
“These sort of advances save lives”
Mr Scipione said police already used immersive 3D simulation for weapons training.
“We use this now. We’re very heavily involved, we’re very heavily committed. For instance, every one of our new recruits that joins the organisation goes through the 3D virtual simulation that comes from our weapons training systems in Goulburn.
“It’s everything from a straight-line shoot to a wrap-around 3d where they walk into an environment confronted from every angle and they’re dealing with shooting incidents, taser incidents, OC-spray events, so we use that very heavily now.
He said police used simulation for training staff in decision making which was “all about getting big numbers of police, bringing them together, to look at critical decisions that need to be made based on events that happened and they’ll simulate everything from a large riot to a crowd crush at a major sporting event”.
NSW Police also had a large presence in social media.
“We have in the Facebook environment a program known as Eyewatch, a system where we can connect with communities. We have 113,000 fans following us on Eyewatch, made up of 110 groups.
“Since we put this into place a bit over a year ago, wed’ve had 44 million hits, we had 3.75 million hits last week.
“We have 30,000 followers on Twitter that we use for a whole range of reasons, not only to get information out, we use it now in terms of major events, be it a problem with a flood in Wagga, but we use it for just general operations – (for example) if you’re going into the Mardi Gras tonight, make sure you stay away from this street.”
MR Scipione said NSW Police also had a heavy involvement with YouTube which had led to police receiving a lot of information from the public.
Original article here.
