Mixing Live Hydra Interaction with Virtual Hydra Simulations
Prof. Jonathan Crego M.B.E
Director of the Hydra Foundation May 2021
In June 2020 I wrote a paper called Hydra Presence – the evolution of the Hydra methodology.
In that paper I explained the development work that had taken place to answer the following question:
How do we enable save-life professionals to gain access to Hydra training that is timely and relevant without the requirement for participants to travel or be co-located?
A huge amount of creativity from Adam Crego and his technical team who had already developed the latest Hydra in the Cloud technologies, created a new approach whereby all the existing methodologies of Hydra could be deployed in a virtual system. We called this new approach Hydra Presence. Participants are able to partake in a Hydra exercise, without the requirement of being co-located in a Hydra suite. We ran the first Hydra Presence workshop in December 2020 with University of Portsmouth and delivered their Masters in Police Science course. It was well received by the students, who quickly beame immersed in the exercise, working in virtual in teams, using Hydra tools, in virtual syndicate rooms. The students, represented by virtual avatars had lively discussions, over-talking each other, and working through the management of a simulated sudden death incident, considering their forensic strategies and jointly recording their decisons. From time- to-time all the students met in a virtual plenary room, where guided by their facilitators, differences of approach between different teams, were debated and compared. All of this occurred inside the shared virtual Hydra Presence environment, the students were geographically distant from each other, at locations all over the UK.
A video describing this event can be found at https://vimeo.com/516245370
The intensity of developing these capabilities has consumed us for over 18 months, they are a revolution in simulation technologies, whilst maintaining all that we have learned in the creation of Hydra methods over the last 30 years. We are incredibly proud of these new approaches and the team led by Adam, are now pushing the boundaries even further, as this paper is being written.
However
The technologies have been difficult to design and implement, (this is new territory after all), they have and are pushing the boundaries of immersive learning. However, at the end of the day, as sophisticated and revolutionary as they are, they must be seen as required and essential enabling technologies, through which Hydra methodologies can made deliverable, remotely. A separate technical paper will be forthcoming describing these unique tools. Consequently, this paper will not centre on these technologies, other than when referring to them as enabling methods to provide new approaches to immersive simulated environments. This paper is about the philosophy of using and harnessing these new tools in the creation and delivery of high fidelity, immersive and compelling simulations. It is about describing the creation of new Hydra methods, built on the shoulders of 30 years of Hydra experience and the collective wisdom of over 80 Hydra centres worldwide. It will keep true to the mission of Hydra; the examination of decision making within the context of save-life incidents, and in particular, the development of multi-discipline teams. Whilst ensuring the dynamics and tensions of inter-agency distrust and the realities of the asymmetry of power and influence, play out within high-fidelity high-stake critical incident management.
Now it gets interesting.
The creation of these technologies has enabled us to expand on the existing methodologies of Hydra. New tools have been designed to enable a completely new approach to Augmented Virtual Simulations. It is to this that this paper now turns its attention.
In the post-Covid reality, challenging questions have been asked about the added value of travel and face to face meetings. Or where logistically, it is difficult or impossible to meet at a location. Microsoft Teams ® or Zoom ® calls have evolved as useful tools for teams to share situational awareness and work together. These tools have had a huge impact and in the new post Covid normalities of distant working they are becoming standard working practices; however, they are not tools for simulations (although many innovative simulations have been delivered through them), they are not sufficiently engaging or interactive to replicate the dynamics of team-based decision making within the uncertainties and complexities of dynamic save-life problems.
Hydra Presence provides this environment and is being piloted in universities, the UK National Crime Agency and the London Metropolitan Police Force. These pilots are generating new capabilities for Hydra, they are important and exciting. Emerging from this research is the recognition that a more hybrid approach would reap additional. By Hybrid I am suggesting a mix between live in-person Hydra events where participants work together in syndicate rooms face to face and Hydra Presence students who are working in virtual syndicate rooms.
We have already successfully built methods where remote syndicates engage in Hydra Exercises. British Transport Police have a London Hydra Centre with remote syndicate rooms in Liverpool and Glasgow. Using this approach, participants in the remote syndicate rooms engage in the exercise as if they were down the corridor in the London suite. They participate in plenary session through video linking. This approach is now embedded in BTP and is well tested. There are however constraints. The remote room can not engage directly with individual participants in the central Hydra suite. The remote syndicate members respond as a group through the video link.
Hydra Presence removes these obstacles as each participant logged into the environment is able to engage with their fellow syndicate members directly as a group and individually with participants in the plenary discussions.
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