Domestic Violence

Built with NSW Police

With the creation of ‘Just Another Domestic’ - a Virtual Reality training simulation that puts users into the shoes of a NSW Police officer conducting a domestic violence investigation - the NSW Police Force is leveraging the most powerful, uniquely suited, technology available today to scale experience-based learning.

Educators have long been faced with a difficult trade-off when it comes to preparing learners to make good decisions when faced with dangerous, complex situations. Traditional learning methodologies - lecture, powerpoint, video, and roleplay - run the risk of leaving learners underprepared when faced with the stress and complexities of a real-world event. And understandably so - after all, it’s an incredibly difficult cognitive task to imagine what it must be like to do something you’ve never done before. The alternative, learning ‘on the job’ can introduce untenable risks and costs. Enter Virtual Reality. Through recreating the experience of receiving and responding to a domestic violence call in Virtual Reality, we are able to remove the cognitive effort required to imagine what it would be like to conduct a domestic violence investigation. Instead, much like pilots training in flight simulators, users simply live through the experience - empowered to make decisions centered on procedure and officer safety - failing or succeeding in a risk-free space.

From an individual user’s perspective, the benefits of Virtual Reality training simulations are significant. Nearly two decades of research out of Stanford University shows that memory retention can improve from 10% with traditional learning methods to upwards of 70% in Virtual Reality. Virtual Reality also outperforms traditional methods when it comes to how learners cognitively and emotionally understand a situation, yielding higher rates of positive behavior change when compared to reading text, lectures, or videos. Furthermore, the benefits for group learning cannot be understated. By allowing all learners to share a common, lived experience in Virtual Reality - individuals within groups are able to empathise and discuss a simulation’s subject matter with a level of detail that just wouldn't be possible without actually experiencing it themselves.

Over the past three years, a common thread in all of our Virtual Reality training studies has been high levels of self-reported engagement, learning outcomes, and a desire to encourage colleagues to participate in the training as well. For organizations looking to augment existing education methods with an immersive learning component, the ability to offer a training solution that is not only effective, measurable, scalable but also engaging - which is invaluable.