With virtual reality technology, Motorola Solutions intends to help law enforcement be more efficient

virtual reality glasses (Large)

With a virtual reality headset that fits snugly over the eyes, Motorola Solutions is bringing in the wave of the future. The technology, intended to usher in a new age of high-tech police work, is reminiscent of what the layman, even only a few years ago, might have called science fiction.

Motorola Solutions, as a part of the APCO conference held Tuesday at the Orange County Convention Center, allowed users to try out the headset, which police will use shortly to enhance their operations. With the headset, experts and officials in remote locations will be able to see a bird’s eye drone view of a crowded area and pick out potentially suspicious characters.

Or they could see through the eyes of an officer on the ground, equipped with a body camera. When the individual wearing the headset turns his or her head, in that case, they’ll be able to see everything in the area where the officer is, as if they were actually there.

In every situation, the VR headset aims to make police work faster and more efficient in a world that can increasingly be described as both of those things.

The technology comes from startup Eyefluence, a Motorola Solutions Venture Capital investment, which intends to “envision the future of public safety,” according to a news release.

According to Chief Technological Officer Paul Steinberg with Motorola Solutions, the aim is to allow law enforcement to adapt to the increasingly fast-paced world. A statistic he used to color his point shows the point perfectly: 90 percent of the information we have available now is from the last two years. Society, he said, is growing faster than people can keep up with, including law enforcement officers — and that’s where Motorola Solutions comes in.

“There’s video, there’s imagery, there’s pictures, all forms of communication and data, and it’s all useful in some way, but there’s so much of it,” he said. “Trying to filter all that into what’s contextually important at the moment and what’s actionable. That’s where we’re spending a lot of time.”

The VR headset walks a line between old-fashioned manual police work and replacing police with drones and robots to do the job for them, aiming to enhance police work rather than replace it.

“There’s no substitute for human intuition, and the ability for the experience and knowledge,” Steinberg said. “This is meant to help them communicate and to augment their ability to make decisions.”

Steinberg said the customers who would need the VR headset need to have eyes up and hands free, to deal with certain situations in law enforcement. But current technology, such as smartphones and tablets, does the polar opposite, forcing users to keep their eyes down on the screen and their hands occupied.

The headset, then, would be an improvement.

With the VR headset, Steinberg said law enforcement could operate at safer, more efficient levels.

They’ve been demonstrating the technology with local Florida law enforcement and firefighters, Steinberg said, to try addressing the special needs of the state.

Innovation & Design Director Lan Ting Garra said the VR system would help streamline officer interactions through four platforms: incident immersion, shared situational awareness, location flexibility and visual presence.

By allowing experts to access a tense situation from a remote location, the VR headset lets them stay out of the line of fire and also access a situation quicker without having to spend time getting there, she said.

“The question is, people always say a picture is worth a thousand words,” she said. “But what is a streamlined video worth?”

Larry Griffin



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