About
Welcome to XRlabs, the official collaboration between the Belgian Defence, the Federal Police and the Customs Department, where we embark on a journey into the future of immersive technology. In this Technology Horizon Scan, we examine the needs of Belgian Defence XR Labs for an update of their current virtual reality training facilities in sight of a large-scale deployment to many army and law enforcement officers.
To this purpose, we conducted market research on commercially available alternatives in the present day or short-term future, had interviews with industry players, visited the existing XR Lab’s facilities and a commercial VR arena, and then drafted our conclusions.
Requirements
A Requirement Specification document was created which collects the minimum set of system specifications that any proposed solution should meet to satisfy the customer needs. Some examples are: track up to 8 users, the user(s) can be tracked in an area of maximally 25x25m, the tracked area can be modified to smaller areas down to 5x5m, etc.
Satisfying these requirements would make sure all the Key User Requirements, that were drafted a couple of years ago with the Special Forces Group, were met.
Three phases were implemented in this process:
On-site meeting and interview with the customer.
Formalization of the requirements.
Customer review and prioritization.
These phases led to this list of features that are indispensable:
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- The resolution should be high enough
- Tracking should be accurate and allow for all movements
- The system must withstand frequent user rotations in 1h shifts
- There must be software independence
- It must be able to run locally, without the involvement of 3rd parties.
- The whole body of 8 users and their equipment should be tracked
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Consideration
Our selection process focused on headsets that could enhance the currently used equipment in the Belgian Defence XR Labs. This initial exploration led to a list of five headsets. We started by comparing the fundamental specifications and reviewing feedback for each of these headsets.
However, due to limitations such as unsuitability for larger areas, dependencies on specific accounts not compliant with Belgian Defence guidelines, and subpar materials or build quality, we narrowed down the options to two headsets. A deep dive analysis was conducted to compare these two headsets across various configurations. Subsequently, a trade-off document was employed to arrive at final recommendations.
Recommendations
The trade-off document is used to facilitate the decision-making when selecting the best fit-for-purpose system. Each system under consideration is scored on a list of criteria agreed with the customer.
Each criterion is assigned a score by the customer, indicating the importance of the criteria in the final decision-making. The criteria are also divided into categories and each category is assigned their own weighting factor. The final impact of a criteria is computed by multiplying the criteria weight factor with the category weight factor.
The 3 preferred configurations, according to the trade-off table, include the same headset with either Location-Based Entertainment (LBE) , floor or roof-mounted antilatency tracking. The scores of all these systems are very similar, indicating each system comes with its own pros and cons, which must be considered more in detail.
The main reason the LBE system is not the preferred option in the trade-off table is because of the timeline and the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of the trackers. They are currently not available, and thus not validated as a system. In contrast, Antilatency is currently in operation in applications identical to the one object of this study. If we discard the timeline and TRL in our considerations (by setting the trade-off weight to 0 in the table) we find that the LBE system is the preferred system. The advantage of the LBE system primarily stems from the good tracking at an exceptionally low cost.
The recommendation would therefore be that, if the project’s timeline allows this, it is put on temporary hold until more information becomes available on the upcoming new LBE trackers, which should be imminent anyway.
