“I absolutely believe you’ll be better off training with XVR, and I really see the added value for the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee.”

Leon Bloem – Developer Serious Gaming & e-Learning – Royal Netherlands Marechaussee

I have worked in operations for many years and while working and practicing with XVR I recognise a lot from that time. Now I build scenarios based on my experience and control the system during training sessions.

We train various aspects, such as the procedures of the team leader during an explosives reconnaissance, or observing and identifying during predictive profiling. Because of the creative freedom XVR gives you, the training courses are very unpredictable which means students never know what is going to happen. A wrong decision can cause the scenario to go wrong. As a result, they have to be constantly on their guard.

These unexpected events cause the stress level to rise quite a bit. Some participants even get completely overwhelmed. So it’s helpful and important to practise these situations in a controlled environment. Those moments clearly demonstrate the added value of practising in this way within the training.

In addition, staff in training can already familiarise themselves with certain specific locations in the virtual world. Then they have already done an initial reconnaissance, they know where their posts are and they become familiar with the lines of sight. Then you have already learned in a safe environment what it looks like in practise.

During the students evaluation it became very clear they felt like they had actually been on location. The old-fashioned ‘pro-memory’ makes room for an interpretation in virtual reality, which means students no longer have to concern themselves with imagining, but can fully focus on applying the theory. With this way of training we achieve a higher learning efficiency.

What is also particularly pleasing is the collaboration with XVR. For some time now, we have been an innovation partner to XVR, and we have been working together on the development of multiplayer VR, among other things, to discover where the added value lies by means of various prototypes.