Patrick Hagan is a technical specialist for the Houston Fire Department who had an opportunity to try out a VR demo by HTX Labs featuring an active shooter critical response training scenario. This demo inspired him to start collaborating with HTX Labs to see how virtual reality could be used train new firefighters, but also create atypical training scenarios for teams of firefighters. I talked with Hagan at the Immersive Technology Conference in Houston Texas about some of the training needs of first responders, and how he envisions the role of augmented and reality technologies to help provide proper training so they’re better prepared to help them go home at night to their families.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
This is a listener supported podcast, considering making a donation to the Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Music: Fatality
Support Voices of VR
- Subscribe on iTunes
- Donate to the Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Music: Fatality &
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been thinking a lot about the virtual reality industry and what is the thing that's going to really help it take it where it's at now and help it getting out into the mainstream. And so what I've been discovering is that I feel like it's going to be in the enterprise, actually. I just went to the Virtual Reality Strategy Conference in San Francisco like a week ago, and then to the Immersive Technology Conference in Houston, Texas just this week. And the big focus was on enterprise VR and training and a lot of the applications that are not necessarily as exciting or fun and sexy as gaming, but is actually going to be the thing that I think is going to help the overall virtual reality industry grow. So I was at the Immersive Technology Conference, the first night party on Monday night, and up came a firefighter who was extremely excited about the potential of virtual reality. He was working with a local company there called HTX Labs and working on some different prototypes and demos. And he kind of represents somebody that I haven't interviewed a lot within the VR community, which is a customer who has a lot of needs. Typically, I think of a project and virtual reality as to one of three different stages. Either it's at the idea stage where someone has an idea, they haven't built in anything yet, and they just have an idea of what they want to make and what it's going to be like. And then there's the demo where they've actually created something that you can take a look at. And it's not the full experience, but it's at least something that will give you a sense of where things are going. And then they get to the point where they finish that project and they actually have the full experience that you can have. I typically tend to prefer to talk to people who have an actual piece of content that they've created or have finished the product. And then that gives me better a sense of the experience that they have created and where this is all going. Patrick was somebody who just was kind of at that idea phase. And so I was a little hesitant to talk to him. But after talking to him, I realized that actually he's somebody that's even before the idea phase. He's the customer. He's describing the needs that he has. And as he describes all of these different needs that he has for virtual reality, it's just like, wow, I can kind of really see how the standalone headsets will be able to start to really serve the types of training needs that these public servants like firefighters or policemen have. So I had a chance to sit down with Patrick and to talk about his own entry into the virtual reality field, as well as some of the specific use cases that he has for virtual reality. So this interview with Patrick happened at the Immersive Technology Conference on Monday evening, November 6, 2017 in Houston, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:48.980] Patrick Hagan: My name is Patrick Hagan. I work for the Houston Fire Department. My official title is a technical specialist, which is a position that was developed to try to figure out what the state of technology in the fire service is, where we are as an actual department, and where we would like to be a year, five years, 10, 30 years even in the future as a leader in the fire services in terms of technology.
[00:03:12.801] Kent Bye: And so what was it about virtual reality that got you interested in seeing how this could be used in some potential way with the fire department here in Houston?
[00:03:22.464] Patrick Hagan: So another department here in Houston, the Mayor's Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security, said, hey, we have this virtual package, virtual reality team that we've interviewed with or had met, and you need to go check them out. It's really awesome. So I got pulled in by a young man named Jack. and took me over to HTX Labs and said, you've got to get immersed in this experience. They threw me in VR. It was really my first foray. I had done the Google Cardboard, but nothing with a vibe and nothing with true, really good depth virtual reality. And they had an active shooter scenario. It was amazing how immersive it was, you know, you hear the gunshots and all that and you immediately crouch down and at that point, you know, in retrospect you realize that you were immersed and all these light bulbs and whistles start going off with how can we use this in the fire service, you know, can you virtualize fire, can you create this scenario, that scenario, and the guys are saying yes, yes, and yes. And the more that they started saying yes, the more excited myself and my colleagues started getting with, we can do a lot in this virtual environment that is either not safe to do in the real world or that is just too costly to do. Every time that we light up a burn building, we start paying EPA fees and different things like that. So the different scenarios that we can do at a much lower cost were attractive to us, and the scenarios that are relatively atypical for the Houston fire service. We may never experience an earthquake, but why not train on it? We may never experience a tsunami, but why not train on it? And while those seem outlandish, we may be able to brainstorm a couple of scenarios that are much more real world, but still relatively atypical that we can be prepared for, at least to some degree, before that event ever happens. So yeah, why not VR?
[00:05:01.284] Kent Bye: Can you talk a bit about Hurricane Harvey and from your perspective as a fireman being on the ground in terms of what you were seeing in terms of facing these experiences maybe for the first time and if you were kind of wishing that you may have had a little bit more training for what you were facing?
[00:05:17.983] Patrick Hagan: Sure. So Houston is no stranger to flooding. We have flooding events on a pretty regular occurrence. It seems actually in the past three years we've had a major flood every year that's affected at least a few hundred people. Or in the case of Harvey, tens of thousands of people have lost their homes and some of them all the possessions that they own. I'm not sure where the virtual environment is going and how we can actually get to a training scenario with that. But that being said, so many people have approached us of, do you have the equipment that you need? And one of the answers to that is no, I don't believe that we have the training equipment that we need. We can buy all the boats that we can get our hands on. We can have all these high water vehicles. But the decision-making process that a firefighter or a fire officer or a chief officer has to go through in, this is your area, these are where your people are, how do you get to them, how do you organize, not just a water event, but a water event of the scale of Harvey is something we had never experienced before. And now with that fresh in our minds, if we can talk to the people in the VR world and let them know our experience and the scale of it, maybe we can retro a scenario that can prepare us for whether it's another Harvey style event or even a much smaller event so that our officers, it's not the first time that they sit down to organize a response of that scale.
[00:06:39.294] Kent Bye: And it sounds like that your position is fairly unique. Maybe you can talk a bit about more about what kind of led from where you were at and then how you got into sort of more of this technological advisory role.
[00:06:51.811] Patrick Hagan: Sure, it's almost a position that came about in happenchance. I got wrangled into a little bit of work for the Super Bowl. They had a technical need for monitoring some of the asset tracking programs that we had to track our members that were on foot in real time during the Super Bowl. We had a very large footprint for what was called the NFL experience out in Discovery Green, several acres, and we needed to track those assets. All that being said, once I started getting into that world, different projects started appearing that were tech-based. And not having a lot of technical training, you know, I'm not a programmer, I'm not a computer engineer, computer scientist, but it's always been an interest, and I've always picked it up pretty easily, and I've always kind of kept the pulse of what's going on, what's the forefront of technology. I really enjoy watching what is sci-fi, and I'm not a Star Trek fan or a Star Wars guy, but, you know, watching something that is sci-fi, and then 15 years later I can now do that on my cell phone in real time, you know, call somebody across the world and have a face-to-face conversation, something that 25 years ago seems so far beyond even our technology that would become available during our lifetimes. I get very excited by that. And so I started having those same types of wants to look at the cutting edge technology, but adding it to my career, and in this case, the fire service. What products are out there that we can have that would make our jobs safer, that would make the public safer, that could make us more efficient, better stewards of city resources? And that kind of came up in a conversation during the Super Bowl and somebody brought me to a chief and said, hey, you need to talk to this guy. We need to get him moving in a direction that helps us be a little bit more tech forward. And the more that I've gotten into this position, I've met people from different departments within the city that Houston is very actively seeking to become a leader in technology. They want to have that bleeding edge technology, whether it's video surveillance that helps public safety or real time asset tracking so that they can be a better steward of city resources. They want the technology to make the city better, but they want to build that persona to attract that clientele to the city, whether it's a company or the support structure that those companies need. They're trying to build Houston into that.
[00:09:10.487] Kent Bye: And I'm wondering if you could describe some of the other first responder scenarios and situations that could use some type of virtual training. You had mentioned an active shooter situation where you felt like you were there and immersed in that you were getting shot at and having this visceral emotional reaction that was helping you create a context and an emotional state of being that you could start to take action and make decisions. But I'm curious to hear some of the other scenarios that you think that might help firefighters to be trained in.
[00:09:41.202] Patrick Hagan: Sure. One of the first that comes to mind, and just because of its difficulty in the actual world, is high-rise firefighting training. In order for us to run drills, a true high-rise scenario, we have to find a building that either has no occupants or very few occupants on a weekend. We have to pull tons of resources in, which means usually taking them out of service so the public is at a diminished protection level. And there are just so many facets to go into training a true high-rise fire. We have to worry about where the true water supply is, how we're going to hook into the building, where all the fire alarms and panels are, where the standpipes are, stairwells, and all these things. There's so much planning that goes into that that it's difficult to do it in the real world. And even just gathering the manpower, again, it's difficult to gather it. And even if we take guys that are off shift, we're now having to pay them overtime, lots of different scenarios. In the virtual world, we can take that. We can take a true building, a virtualized real asset in the physical world, and incorporate the true electrical grid that exists within that building, the true piping for the standpipes, the water connections and resources, and run a high-rush drill start to finish, and it affects no one except for the guys that get the benefit of learning the training. That being said, I say it affects no one, it affects the occupants of that building. That building is now better protected because we've trained for an actual event in that building, whether it was on the first floor, the 30th floor, or the 80th floor, we have experience in that building. So I look at a model where eventually every building is virtualized in the city of Houston from a mom-and-pop plumbing shop to an 80-story high-rise, and we can train scenarios at our convenience, not at a resident's or an occupant's inconvenience. So high-rise is high on my list for virtual scenarios. Even just a basic house fire. If I can take rookie firefighters, cadet firefighters at our training academy and run them through a house fire and learn what to expect and learn cause and effect. You went into the fire but you didn't check the door behind you so it created a different flow path than what you expected. All of a sudden you're a victim of a flashover and you're dead in virtual reality. reset in real life a much higher price to pay. So that initial cognitive learning of fire flow for a cadet all the way up to how a incident commander runs that high-rise or that five alarm fire where maybe you know you're a relatively new chief and you've run some good fires in your career but you've never run that 511 fire where all of a sudden you're managing 40, 50, 60 companies of men, which is several hundred bodies, that's a lot to be responsible for. If you can pace yourself through that in a virtual scenario, that first, second, third time, so the first time you really come across that in a physical world, you have at least some experience. And the more that we run guys through that, and that's another big part of the virtual environment, are the metrics that we can gather from it. If I can run 50 chiefs through that extreme scenario, or 4,000 firefighters through the same house fire scenario, and assuming that we can get the physics right and the training right in it, and figure out, hey, everybody turned left when they should have turned right, or 80% of your firefighting force went in and didn't check that door after they checked it for an occupant and it changed the outcome of the fire, those are things that we can do to augment our training to be safer, to be more efficient,
[00:13:00.780] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it sounds like in those scenarios that there's also a huge team component. So actually coordinating between different people. And so can you talk a bit about that in terms of like the existing scenarios of training where it's a lot about, you know, as a squad or as a department, you're actually going out and working with each other so that when you are out in the field, you're actually kind of having all those protocols down.
[00:13:21.873] Patrick Hagan: Yeah, I look at that kind of in two respects. One, you know, typically at a fire station you train with your guys and your crew most of the time. You get with other fire stations or your entire district is how we do it here in Houston, which is four or five stations. It's difficult to get those guys together. In virtual reality, you don't have to be co-located so you can do mutual training much more often, even to the tune of mutual aid training. If the city of Houston wants to partner with the Port Authority and do fire training for a shipboard firefighting drill that's something relatively atypical for most Houston firefighters, but not so much for the Port of Houston, we can get together and do collaborations like that. So the whole you don't have to be co-located, I really enjoy that aspect. But at the same time, the Houston Fire Department is an extremely busy fire department. We don't always have time to physically co-locate. So even if it's the station down the street or the ladder truck and the engine at the same house, same fire station, I really enjoy that we can still get something out of training and not have to take the time to travel to a location, make sure it's secure, make sure we're not affecting the public. But that's something that I've yet to see. It's something I'm very excited about in terms of I want to put 48 people from the Houston Fire Department in the same scenario where they can affect each other. We get up onto a roof of a residential and cut a hole that's too small to not vertically ventilate enough, and it affects the outcome of the fire. I want other crews to be able to experience the effect of that. That's not something that's very easy for us to do in the real world.
[00:14:46.394] Kent Bye: Well, I'm curious if it's feasible that when there's downtime, where they're waiting for the next call, that that might be an opportunity to do training scenarios. If that would be feasible, or if people really kind of just need that downtime, just be prepared for whenever it's coming up?
[00:15:02.421] Patrick Hagan: Yes and yes. Downtime's important in the fire service, but at the same time, when I come to work, I come to work for 24 hours. If we get to catch a nap in the evening hours, that's great. A lot of times, especially weekend nights and depending on the part of the city that you're in here in Houston, it's busy. the last fire station I was assigned to, I was awake for 24 hours at that fire station. So that being said, if I can catch 30 minutes to run through a training scenario, you know, our schedule is such that we work a day on, a day off, a day on, and then a little bit of a break before we come back for our next tour of duty. During those two days, if I can spend 30 minutes each day training on a scenario, whether it's typical or atypical, that's training that might allow me to go home that next tour. If it's the first time I've ever experienced a fire in an atypical location, a garage that has several pressurized vessels behind it, propane tanks or something like that. And I learned something from that fire that I take to a fire that is in the physical world two tours later, and that training is the reason I go home. Yeah, I'll do what I can to get that training every chance that I get. I think that's every firefighter's mission. As much as we're here invested in the public to provide public safety, every day we want to go home just as much as you want to go home from a nine to five desk job. We have wives, husbands, family, children, That's our primary goal in life, the same as everybody else. So if I can find training, whether it's in a book, whether it's augmented reality, virtual reality, I'm gonna use it to the best of my ability so that I go home that next morning.
[00:16:34.603] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it also seems like that there's a bit of a paradox with firefighting and technology in the sense that there's so much technology that's there that's helping you, but yet what do you do if that technology fails? And so maybe you could talk a bit about, like, the degree to which the fire department is relying upon technology, but then, you know, being able to be trained on scenarios when that technology kind of breaks down.
[00:16:55.970] Patrick Hagan: Sure. I think it's almost a standard in the fire service, and like many emergency services, that you have a plan A, but by the time everything is all said and done, you're probably at plan D, E, or Z sometimes. In terms of using VR and different technologies, We want that to be maybe not even the primary training tool, but another tool in the toolbox. If I can use that to create some of the atypical scenarios, or maybe even the first touch scenarios for some cadets or early officers, things like that, to get them exposed to something, that's just another piece of the puzzle that makes them that well-rounded, well-educated firefighter that allows them not only to mitigate the situation, but to go home that next day. So, yes, we want to have all this technology as a tool, but when it fails, and often in the fire service things do fail, we need to have that plan B, C, D, and E, not only have them, but still train with them, practice them, so that when it gets to that point, whether it's we lose a VR program for training, or we get to a point where we're somehow using virtual reality on large-scale scenarios, if I can get real-time geo-information of a flood, You know, my incident commanders are trained in using that to make their command level decisions, but all of a sudden our command van loses that technology and we don't have that feature. Can we still operate? I hope so. I think that we in the emergency services prepare for things like that. We know that technology can help us, but we also know that when you show up to a Harvey-style event, LTE starts to fail. Even power itself starts to fail when fuel runs short and and all these different things come into play that, yes, we still know how to use the paper map. Yes, we still know how to fight fire with just putting the wet stuff on the red stuff, learning to read smoke. All of these things are the tried and true methods within the fire service. We want to maintain those. We want to supplement those with things like virtual reality, augmented reality, and all these technologies.
[00:18:48.550] Kent Bye: Can you tell me a bit more about your first experiences of virtual reality and kind of the experiences that you had in those visceral moments where your light bulb just went off as to the potential of how this could be applied to what you do?
[00:19:00.878] Patrick Hagan: Sure. I got called into HTX Labs here in Houston again by some mutual friends and so they put me into VR and they walked me through just a basic training scenario and at that point I'm thinking oh you know I'm not an avid gamer but at some point in my life I was into video games and I can pick this up and I picked up the controls pretty quick and was able to move around with ease but what really caught my attention and it was pretty high-end hardware that we were using and good programming I guess on their part But the smoothness of it, that is something that I didn't expect. I expected it to be choppy. I expected it to not have this surreal feeling. And I guess it really didn't in the trainer app. You know, it was fun. I got to pick up a VitaWater bottle and I got to throw it at the Starbucks cappuccino machine and it bounced off and that was cool. It felt like I was interacting with the real world. But then they put you into one of their scenarios, and in this case I was doing an active shooter, and the instant that you hear that weapon being fired, or you can hear the footsteps coming up behind you, and you turn around to see if that active shooter scenario is playing out, and I'm about to get shot point blank, and you crouch down and your heart starts to race. At that moment, that instant that I crouched down, I'm thinking, holy cow, this is awesome. And at that same time, I'm thinking, why can't this be instead of an active shooter? Why can't this be a building on fire? Why can't I have 10 more, 40 more, 100 more crew members that are live people, also in virtual reality, also making these decisions in this environment and seeing how they interact with each other. It's not only a great tool to help you learn, it's a really neat way to maybe figure out a new way of interacting in an actual physical environment. Maybe we're not being the most efficient inside that physical environment, whether it's a fire or a rescue or whatever, and it gives us that chance to play around with it, where we get to experience something, typical or atypical, and manipulate the variables, whether it's how many people we put in the scenario, the order in which we go into the building, how we apply water to the fire, and I realize there's a lot of technological things that have to go right. You have to have reliable physics engines for fire and smoke and conditions. to make all that happen properly in the virtual world. But I think if we're not there, we're really, really close. And so I look forward again to having all these toys at my fingertips that all these guys are out there dreaming up for us.
[00:21:22.747] Kent Bye: It seems like that firefighters are first responders and they're dealing with a lot of really intense scenarios and situations that I'd imagine that invokes a lot of this post-traumatic stress disorder for people. They're just forced to be put in the situation to find ways to cope and deal with all that stress and trauma. And I'm curious if you see a role for virtual reality to help the firefighters cope with the different intense experiences they have to go through.
[00:21:47.347] Patrick Hagan: It's interesting you mention that. So I haven't stepped too far into the possibility of virtual reality helping somebody with something like PTSD or other ailments that a lot of people in the first responders world get exposed to. Up until about three or four days ago, I'd actually talked to somebody from Houston Methodist Hospital, and they were doing music therapy. And they talked about how we could potentially collaborate together to help some people with PTSD in the fire service. And again, these light bulbs go off. Why can't we do that in the virtual world? And at this point, because it's a relatively fresh idea that I was exposed to, I'm not sure what that would look like yet. But yeah, here in the past few days, that's something that I've started to mull over. And again, I am definitely not the answer to any of these things and how the Houston Fire Department alone, the fire service, are going to use them. But I want to be the conversation starter, at least here in Houston. Why can't we take these cutting-edge technologies and some of them even bleeding-edge technologies, things that are just dreams in these guys' heads, why can't we take that, run with it, and figure out how it can help my guys with PTSD? how it can help somebody come back to a better state almost immediately after we experience something as horrible as watching a traumatic child injury or death, things like that. I definitely see a role for it. I don't know what that picture looks like yet, but yeah, I think it's inevitable that as this technology advances, as all walks of life really embrace virtual reality, but especially the public service, that there are a lot of opportunities for these things to happen.
[00:23:21.098] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's Skip Rizzo of USC has done some work for over, you know, 10, 20 years of specifically using virtual reality for post-traumatic stress disorder in treatment. And one of the things he said is that they put people into these different scenarios for exposure therapy, but it's in collaboration with the therapist who is there listening to them tell their story and being able to have them emotionally connect to the experience that they went through and being able to kind of cut it out. It's a little bit of a context where you would need maybe a professional to be able to help mediate that and so I don't know if that would be on the days off or whatnot or I could see at a minimum that there would be these different relaxation and meditation applications that could help recenter or maybe find new ways of people on their own be able to use VR to be able to look at some of those things.
[00:24:12.489] Patrick Hagan: Yeah, I don't think that's extremely different from how we use portable music today. So 45 years ago, it's not like you could walk around with your LP in your pocket and listen to it while you walk down the street. And so many people today with these portable music players, whether it's your phone or something fancier, they find that escape in their music. You see people walking around up and down streets with their Beats headphones on or sitting in an office with their headphones escaping into this alternate world while they're either at work or relaxing, whatever it is. I don't see why VR should be any different and maybe even much more capable of helping somebody either, like you said, recenter, refocus, or potentially, like you said, with professional help. work their way from a place that they don't enjoy being with their mental health back to a place where they connect with the people that they're trying to connect with.
[00:24:59.518] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:25:08.390] Patrick Hagan: I don't know, how far do you want to take that? Am I sticking a large wire in the back of my head, Matrix style, or are we talking in the near future? If I had to give a wish list of the things that I want, and some of these products exist, I want a firefighter in full gear that has a mask, that either projects a virtual image or maybe even an augmented mixed reality style something that I can send them into a burned building and create different scenarios for them to mitigate, whether it's an EMS incident, whether it's a fire incident, and they have physical real-world feedback, so reaction force from a nozzle, heat from gear, the audible of I can hear somebody but if I turn my head, yeah, okay, I hear it, they're upstairs. All of those senses being invoked to get the truest experience possible but in a relatively safe environment. And again, especially for up-and-coming people in the fire service or emergency medical service, where these are their first exposures, we need to make sure that they understand what they're getting themselves into. There's somewhat of a history of people getting into the fire service and two or three years down the road figuring out it just isn't for them. This can also be a tool to help you figure out, hey, is this the career path I want to choose? Am I built to see and hear and experience some of the things that you'll experience in the fire service? And then on the flip side of that, the training aspect of it, If we get to a point where everything is so immersive with so many senses, not just visual but tactile, I'm pushing and pulling objects in the real world that's augmented by something, some overlay in a virtual world or an augmented something to give me information in my heads-up display in my mask. I think all of these things are there. I'm not sure that they physically exist in the world today. People are doing these things. Do they all exist in one package that is cost effective? And I say cost effective because in public service, you're almost always getting your paycheck and your resources from taxpayers. And we want to make sure that we don't go off and spend millions and millions of dollars on this technology. and it doesn't have a purpose for us. So yeah, I want the biggest, baddest toys out there, but I want it to be cost-effective in terms of being responsible, being a good steward of city resources. But yeah, I want everything that you can throw at me. I want to see how far this generation of engineers can push this technology.
[00:27:28.374] Kent Bye: Yeah, with the standalone headsets I sort of get the sense of like right now you have mobile VR headsets and you have the standalone headsets that are coming and then you have the high-end PC VR with six-degree-of-freedom and positional tracking. And the standalone headsets that have positional tracking and six-degree-of-freedom controllers sound like that perfect sweet spot of being able to have that level of invoking the level of embodied cognition that you need to be able to have these group training scenarios and might be affordable enough to be able to deploy at scale. And so for me, when I look at this and I hear what you're saying is that like, it seems like there's that sweet spot of being able to be good enough to be able to do these different training scenarios, but affordable enough to be able to be deployed at mass scale into many different departments around the country.
[00:28:09.462] Patrick Hagan: Yeah, and I'm not sure if your definition of affordable and my definition of affordable are the same. So, typically when we pay big dollars in the fire service, there are some really cool tech toys out there. You know, we use thermal imaging cameras that are several thousand dollars a piece. And obviously, you know, large apparatus can be upwards of a million dollars. But when it comes to, if I look at the 4,000 members of the Houston Fire Department, or almost a thousand people that are on shift every day, You know, if I'm putting these in every fire station, if I want to do one crew of four members at every fire station, you know, we have a hundred fire stations, we're still talking a pretty significant investment just in the hardware. And then however the software works out, whether that ends up being, we encourage private industry to create a scenario in which they get a benefit and the benefit to the public servants are that we get to train in their facilities. I'm not sure what that model will look like, but yeah, Our goal is to take big boy toys that the virtual reality world has created, make sure that we use them responsibly, but use them to push our understanding and our training models in the FHIR service.
[00:29:18.061] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:29:21.710] Patrick Hagan: No, I appreciate the opportunity and I look forward to these virtual reality companies, augmented reality companies, all these technologies kind of converging and these conversations happening. You know, you said earlier that you hadn't had a chance to talk to many people in the public service. Well, maybe that's time to do that as these toys get to, I use the toys term reverently, as we get to play with all of these fun things that these people are creating, I think it's important to not only experience it from a financial perspective of, I'm a virtual reality company, I want to make a game, or I want to make a product for this company that costs a lot of money. Remember that there's a lot of public servants out there that can do a lot of good with this technology. They may not have the bankroll to do it. Houston, a very large city, one of the largest fire departments in the nation, and we don't necessarily have the bankroll to go out and spend millions and millions on this. So we're going to have to find that balance of people that are willing to work with us and help us find ways, creative ways, to fund us being a better public servant, to fund us being a safer firefighter, a safer law enforcement officer, a more efficient emergency medical technician. So if anybody is looking for somebody that's willing to test their products and maybe not even have a product, if you want to sit down and have a conversation about what Houston feels that the public service industry needs, particularly the fire service industry or fire service needs in terms of virtual reality, augmented reality, those advancing technologies, even communications, please reach out to us. We're more than willing to have that conversation. And if we're not the people you're looking for, chances are we can help you find the people, at least locally here in Texas, that you are looking for. You can reach out and send me an email to my government email address. It's Patrick.Hagan at HoustonTX.gov.
[00:31:08.997] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time. So that was Patrick Kagan. He's a technical specialist for the Houston Fire Department. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, the thing that is the most striking to me is when Patrick told me, hey, look, like if I can do some training on my day off and that's going to allow me to go home. Then I'm going to want to do that training. And the weight of that just really hit me. Like, virtual reality has the potential to save lives, like literally to give people the knowledge they need so that when they're in a very hard situation, that it's going to allow them to go home at night. When I went to the Houston's Immersive Technology Conference, I didn't know what to expect, but what I found was a city that has been through a crazy year. Just a couple of days after the eclipse this year, Hurricane Harvey hit the city and really devastated so many different aspects of people's lives. People literally losing everything that they had. And I met a couple of people in Houston that were in that situation where they had lost everything. They were living with family, working in the VR field. But the other thing was that the spirit of help, of people helping each other in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, it really brought the community and the whole city together. And in some ways, the fact that the Houston Astros just won the World Series was a little bit of a manifestation of that spirit of the city, of them going through a tragedy and trauma and then coming together. Just the Friday before I got there, there had been over a million people in the streets marching and celebrating. And so I'm entering into Houston in this context where people are just super grounded. They love their families and they just want to go home to their families. Houston is a huge city where it's pretty sprawled out. And so people tend to go to work and then they go home. So the character of the city is kind of like the people who are doing VR actually kind of want to use it for good. They want to create experiences that are going to help either enterprises or do things that are going to help people like Patrick. And the frustrating thing to me is that I can see this trajectory of where virtual reality is now and where it's going. And I didn't see any presence from HTC, Oculus, Samsung, Intel, any of the major VR companies that are trying to make VR a thing. I don't think they really get how much the enterprise is going to really be the catalyst for a lot of the future of virtual reality. I think that a lot of people within these companies look at the numbers. How many people are going to be there? How much can be our return on investment? They're missing the story. And the story is this from Patrick, this story that he's talking about. This is the future of virtual reality. This is where and how this technology is going to grow is by serving needs of people like Patrick. Now, to take a step back and look at this technological innovation curve, you know, a lot of these companies are addressing the gamers because the gamers are the people who have the systems and they're the ones that are able to play these different experiences. But as you go from the innovators and early adopters and you start to try to cross that chasm into the early majority, the people who are still somewhat early adopters, you know, I'd say that Patrick certainly someone who's an early adopter, but he's somebody who represents something that is like the fire departments across the country. How are they going to use VR? Is a Gear VR or a Daydream going to be able to serve their needs with the 3DOF controller? Maybe to a certain extent, but not really to the degree that some of these training that you need. You really need positional tracking and six degree of freedom and track controllers. So then you got to think, well, are they going to buy like three huge computer systems for every fire house across their entire city and then be able to have to maintain that over time? And then deal with it breaking, you know, it's a bit of a nightmare if you think about like they're not going to go to the high end of VR with these highest end systems. And so this middle tier of the standalone headsets are perfectly suited for these types of use cases for firemen or to be able to deploy out to enterprise training. As I was talking to lots of people within the enterprise, they can't wait for the standalone headsets because these are going to be finally going to be able to actually deploy the 6Degree of Freedom and HandTrack controllers into these large scales where they don't have to worry about all these other maintenance issues. And so I'm convinced that virtual reality is on this trajectory of this technological evolution curve. And in some senses, I'm not sure what that's going to look like for Houston and for the Houston Fire Department. HTX is in the process of collaborating with Padraic to be able to create different experiences. And they're a startup, and they're starting to get some traction. But as a journalist that typically goes to San Francisco or Los Angeles or Seattle or New York City to see what's happening in VR, I think there's a lot of really fascinating things that are happening in Houston. I'm going to be unpacking some of these other things. The city like Houston is just so focused on the enterprise and doing VR for good is, is actually the thing that I think is going to really help move this entire industry forward. There's so many different other aspects about this interview, just in terms of a lot of the training scenarios are doing group situations. So imagine that, you know, you have some of these standalone headsets in these four departments, and maybe they're networked, they're able to do these training scenarios with other people across to other firehouses around the city. So instead of having to pay people to go all their day off, then they can maybe start to do some of these training scenarios. while they're waiting around and maybe you know a lot of firemen will maybe just take a nap or just want to completely veg out but it could be that there's just a lot of boredom and this could actually be something that's very exciting and generating these different flow states for them to be able to to have fun in the process of learning. The other thing is just this idea of how can VR to be able to use to be able to address some of the trauma that these firemen and first responders have to experience. Just in talking to different firemen, there's just a huge range of really crazy stuff that they go through each and every day. And they oftentimes don't have a lot of ways to really cope or process with that. So imagine if they're able to potentially, you know, jump into a VR headset and maybe they're able to have some sort of like access to therapy, people to be able to talk through some of their experiences and get some help. Again, I think that, you know, with virtual reality technologies, you're able to kind of transcend the limitations with space and physical proximity. And you can start to create some of this physical presence with people who otherwise they may not have access to. And finally, I was really struck when Patrick was talking about how important it is to be able to have all of the actual real things that are happening in a building for these different training scenarios. And that the more that you can actually train on these buildings where you actually have the kind of symbolic map of the architecture of the CAD drawings and the them drawings of everything that's happening in the guts within the building then that's actually information that could be very helpful for some of the firefighters and that if you start to do that first within virtual reality then I could imagine a future when eventually you have firefighters who have augmented reality glasses so that when they're actually at that actual building you could potentially have that overlaid as they're literally trying to save lives. So I see this technological roadmap of starting with virtual reality training, but eventually, you know, when they're actually deployed out in the field, there could be all sorts of different applications for augmented reality headsets. And so they're kind of like really these sister technologies where for the training context, virtual reality may actually be better, but when you're actually out in the field, then you could start to have all sorts of different information that could help them do their job better right there in the moment. And also, as they're trying to think about the future of how do they use virtual reality technologies to help doing logistics and planning, you know, what if they had like live feeds of what was happening in the flooding situation and you have what Patrick said, like the command center of people looking at these virtual reality technologies and then being able to communicate different directions but also having different training scenarios for the commanders maybe you don't actually need to have the people that are below the commander be actual real people what if you're able to simulate all of these hundreds of different people in these different teams and that as a commander you're able to guide and direct them and just be able to go through these atypical type of training scenarios. That was a big thing that I got is that there's all sorts of atypical situations that first responders have to be able to know how to respond to. And the more that they have the opportunity to have the training to be able to put themselves into that context, to be able to make choices and take action, then they're going to be able to feel more confident when that scenario actually happens. And that could actually help save their lives and allow them to go home to their families. So that's all that I have for today and first of all I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast and also to send a shout out to all my Patreon supporters who are able to allow me to do this type of journalism. I wouldn't be able to do what I do without my support from Patreon and I kind of see what I'm doing as an evolution of trying to cover the VR industry in a way that nobody else is doing. I was the only journalist that was at the Immersive Technology Conference. I was the only person there talking to people like Patrick to try to see what was happening at the ground floor in the trenches of the virtual reality community and where this is all going. And I think that there's so many other journalists and, frankly, the major companies that are really missing the story here. To me, the future of virtual reality is this. It's like putting virtual reality into all sorts of training scenarios to be able to help save lives. So if you want to help get this story out and help support me as I'm doing this type of journalism, then I really need your support on Patreon. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference to allow me to continue to do this type of work. So you can donate and become a member today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
