Enhanced immersive learning to support police training for criminal investigations

From domestic violence through to Cyber-crime, front line Police officers face a complex array of societal challenges daily. Maintaining a training environment that helps better prepare officers for the complexity of modern Policing against a backdrop of continued budget cuts is one of the greatest challenges for today's law enforcement trainers and an area where emerging immersive technologies can play a key role by creating a simulated 'real-world' training environment unparalleled by traditional training techniques.

The ability to recreate truly complex situations using immersive technology is of particular value in preparing officers for investigation-style scenarios, an area of police training that is hard to replicate effectively and an area unfulfilled by current eLearning technologies. It is this market gap that the proposed project seeks to address through the development of an enhanced interactive video authoring tool that will allow the user to create complex immersive learning scenarios across customizable topics and modules, with unique in-scenario interactions, data capture, reporting and analytics with the following potential impacts.

-Enable officers to better to test potential decision-based outcomes/approaches around complex investigations, improving problem solving and decision making in a safe learning environment.

-The ability to better track performance and learning based outcomes, supporting an improved knowledge base and sharing of best practice.

-Improve the cost-effective scaling of training through digitization.

-The ability to customise content with an authoring capability applicable to complex scenarios ranging from fraud investigation, through to terrorism, pandemics and major disasters.

With Innovate UK support, the delivery of the project will be accelerated, enabling the Bolton based Near-Life to exploit a UK wide market need. If successful the arising product will be exploited to Police Forces globally with relevance also to fire services, wider emergency respondents and the insurance sector for improved training around complex investigative scenarios.