Dauntless: The Untethered Military, and Police Action Simulation

Dauntless is an accurate, real-time motion capture and simulation technology that leverages a AAA game engine and untethered VR HMD's to create an immersive simulated experience that can be used to train, police, and military for real life situations.

I'm Mark Covey. I'm the chief operating officer for Motion Reality Incorporation out of Marietta, Georgia. And we're here partnering with Intel and HP showing our DAUNTLESS law enforcement and military virtual reality simulator. 

DAUNTLESS is a labor of love that's taken about 33 years. We started as a traditional motion capture company in 1984. But it's been the goal of our boss, the CEO and chairman, Dr. Tom McLaughlin, to make it into a multi-person, tetherless virtual reality simulation. So in 33 years, we've come from doing mocap for The Polar Express to doing full out multi-person, tetherless VR. 

So what you're seeing in the background here is a law enforcement training, which we'll put young police officers going through the academy through so they can understand what they're looking for, what signs to look for in a hostile environment, how to de-escalate a situation, and how, in harm's way, to act in their safety and the safety of the public. It can also be used in a military force, where you can put 12 people in a volume at one time so they can learn small team tactics in a squad level tactical environment, either internal and external. 

The cool thing about the volume behind me, it's only 1,200 square feet, but it can replicate a neighborhood of a Turkish alley, for example. So no matter how small your real space is, your virtual space can be as large as you can dream it. In our typical product, which is about the size of a basketball court, we've actually put a 64,000 square foot, multi-leveled high school for law enforcement to practice active shooter scenarios. 

We got into the booth through a partnership with Intel and Hewlett-Packard through a serendipitous meeting in Huntsville, Alabama. Bumped into some HP personnel. We started talking about VR. And in the past six months, grew up to have a very good relationship with Hewlett-Packard and Intel. And so what you see are guys using the HP servers with Intel components and HP backpacks with Intel components, all integrated, both software and hardware, with our components to make it a full-out training environment. 

It goes back to our legacy of being a motion capture company. Our technology's been used in many of the major performance capture movies that you know of. And so we took our traditional mocap technology. You see 40 mocap cameras on the volume behind us. They're actually optically tracking all the marker balls on the individuals behind us. And each one of those marker balls are assigned to a trainee. So the computer systems knows which marker balls are with which individual, which allows us to get the multi people in there at the same time, yet keep them as separate entities. 

That is being tracked in one of the HP servers for tracking software. It's then going into a game server, second of our servers. The game currently is [? Cry. ?] We're adapting the Unity 3D, and we've used other game engines as well. That's doing the image generation. 

Between the game and the tracking, it's integrated, or adjudicated, in a third server, which is the battle master controller, which then sends the game state wirelessly to the HP backpack, which renders the image and pipes into our head-mounted display. Currently using Sensics OSVR. 

Well, the future of VR is not locked into law enforcement or military. I mean, it can go into-- as my boss would say, we are limited, but we're limited by only those things that can move. If it can move, we can actually train it, we can play in it, we can replicate it, we can have fun with it. 

So the interest in VR is figuring out what's the next step. Perhaps it's a haptic device so that you can feel the environment, not just see it and interact in it. Perhaps an aural or even smell, bringing it in more and more realistic. 

The great thing about VR is it's cost cutting, at the same time-- with regards to training anyway, it's cost cutting as well as realistic. I spent 27 years with the United States Army, and I'll tell you, my experience is soldiers don't like to get shot. And yet, you want them to understand the negative ramifications of doing something poorly. 

This VR system behind me provides those negative ramifications. If they get shot, there are tens devices on their body which will give them a shock to let them know they've done something wrong. Now, you couple that with the after-action review capability that's inherent in the system. 

As soon as they step out of the volume, they can go to a training station and re-watch the entire scenario they just walked through, not just from their viewpoint, but also from the adversary's viewpoint, or from what we call a God view or an overhead view of the entire battle. And that type of instant feedback immediately after is invaluable in training. And I'm talking about training in law enforcement and the military. This could obviously translate to sports, translate to medical training, it could translate to anything that you want to capture the motions of an individual and tap it into an image generation to see what's going on.