News

Secret Service deploys training kiosks

January 25, 2011

The U.S. Secret Service will upgrade its tabletop-based training models with interactive training kiosks, according to Gamasutra.

The Site Security Planning Tool will consist of three kiosks at the Secret Service's Washington training center, each with a 55-inch stereoscopic touch-screen display and projectors and cameras to create a limited virtual reality environment, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Bohemia Interactive's underlying Virtual Battlespace simulation will allow trainees to evaluate simulated threats, including armed assaults and suicide bombings from both a third-person overhead view and a first-person virtual walkthrough perspective. The same basic simulation software has been used by the UK's Ministry of Defence since 2007.

In the future, funders at the DHS hope the training program will be able to account for bystander health effects from chemical, radiological or biological attacks, and to account for a wider range of potential attacks.

Once the kiosks are deployed this spring, they will largely replace "Tiny Town," a series of scale models of various potential incident locations that's been used by the government protection agency for over 40 years.