I’m currently working on a deep dive comparison / review of the ACE XR vs. GAIM (handgun and long gun simulators) for SNW. Having spent many hundreds of hours training on a conventional LaserShot simulator (projector / screen / shot camera), as well as having worked with the Virtra, iMarksman, and similar trainers, I can say that both the ACE XR and GAIM blow conventional simulators away.

There’s also a lot of new stuff on the horizon (e.g., GAIM has a product about to drop that is a modified Dryfiremag that links to the controller via Bluetooth, so that you use your own weapon as the controller, and a drop-in trigger pack for AR’s that do the same thing), and I suspect it won’t be too long before someone figures out a way to create simulated recoil via weights and servos at a consumer-grade price. (There are some very expensive commercial grade simulators with these capabilities, but nothing affordable yet.) I also have heard that Clazer (older VR clay shooting simulator that uses your own shotgun as the controller) may be relaunched soon for the Meta VR platform.

Similarly, there are already haptic vests on the market that could be used to deliver a tunable “pain penalty” in simulated FxF training, similar to the pain penalty a trainer could manually administer through the old Virtra “shock belt.” So far, however, I haven’t seen a program that uses either the ACE XR or GAIM sim weapons in a PvP/FxF program.

I tried my first VR shooter back in 1991 at Comdex (Virtuality’s “Dactyl Nightmare” VR arcade system). I was immediately struck with the potential for using that for actual training as the tech matured, and since then I have been waiting for an affordable VR training program.

Let’s just say “it’s here” . . . and the future of this kind of virtual training is only going to get better.