Dan and I popped down to the Strip Gun Club for a hands-on session with the AccuShoot Live-fire Experience (LFX). This incredible training (and entertainment!) tool combines a high-tech projector system with dozens if not hundreds of shooting scenarios and real, live firearms for an immersive and interactive shooting experience combined with real-time, in-depth data collection and feedback.
The system itself consists of a video projector, camera, speaker, and processor all housed inside of a bullet-resistant steel box. The projector projects a video or static image onto a screen, while the camera sees your bullet impacts and the processor crunches all the data near-instantly. Some of that data is used to affect real-time changes to the projected video (e.g. targets explode, your impacts are highlighted, etc), and all of it is logged and digested for scoring and training purposes.
A tablet is used as the primary user interface, most of which is projected on the big target screen as well. All of those shooting scenarios are accessible via the tablet. Everything from official law enforcement and licensing test drills (e.g. concealed carry permit shooting test drills for different states, officer qualification drills, etc) to standard USPSA and IPSC style competition stages to live video scenarios taken from actual law enforcement and other video.
Dan started out with some standard target practice before moving onto transition drills and multiple different moving target scenarios.
In this transition drill hits were highlighted in blue, yellow, or red depending on where the impact is on the target.
Lots of after-action data is available including split times between shots. Every single shot can be scrolled through individually to see where the impact was and much more. The system is able to highlight any consistent issues like if your first shot from low-ready or holster draw is usually low, if you tend to swing too far when transitioning between targets, if you aren’t leading moving targets enough, and a heck of a lot of other things as well.
Because it’s a projection on a screen, even if the screen is just a few yards away the system can very realistically simulate distance exactly as though you’re looking down a range at a target 100 yards away, for example. Or play an HD quality first-person-view video as though you’re walking down a forest road when a brown bear suddenly charges out of the trees ~30 yards away and comes right for you. As the person running the tablet, you can choose whether to show instructions beforehand or just throw the shooting right into a scenario like that not knowing what, if anything, is going to happen.
The “silly” stuff is a bunch of fun, especially when shooting with friends and competing for the high score. At the same time, it’s also fantastic training.
Raise your hand if you’ve shot moving targets with a pistol. It’s probably not a lot of us. Shotgun? Of course. Rifle? Maybe if you’re a hunter. So right off the bat this is great training as there are bunches of moving-target scenarios. A fun one was called “bubbles” and it starts with two bubbles that move slowly, but each time you hit one it splits into two and they move faster. Rinse and repeat until you’re missing and swearing.
The other really important training aspect is that a lot of these scenarios force you to use brain power. Between strategy calls (red targets are 4 points, blue are 2, etc), shoot/no-shoot, situational considerations, having to do math, different targets requiring different numbers of hits to clear, and more, it makes you think while you’re shooting and it makes you view the entire scenario the entire time instead of myopically focusing on individual targets.
Before each scenario there’s a slide or two of rules or background. Scoring and such if it’s a game or a target drill, background if it’s a real world scenario.
Law enforcement and other real world scenarios can be pretty intense. The after-action data is solid. AccuShoot’s machine learning allows them to track “shoot” targets separately from no-shoot and miss targets along with designating when it’s acceptable to engage a shoot target and when it isn’t. They’re refining the system’s ability to automatically determine what sorts of objects can be shot through (concealment, like a car door) or not (cover, like a brick wall).
The screen itself is really simple to DIY with a trip to the hardware store. They use sheets of insulation style foam with the thin PVC roofing material (the kind you get in rolls much like vinyl flooring, which would also probably work well) glued on top. It’s affordable and generally lasts around 5,000 rounds before you need to replace the PVC top layer and some or all of the foam, depending.
In the photo above you can see how the actual bullet holes are significantly smaller than the carbon mark. I can definitely see how the PCV lasts a very long time before the camera system starts having difficulty seeing your impacts.
If you’re running a lot of the same drill, meaning you’re stacking impacts in the same spot(s) on the screen, you can easily account for that by shifting the projector a few inches in any direction and that can help extend the life of those PVC sheets.
Now, I admit I lost to the owner of AccuShoot, but I only ran the drill two times (5:17 on the first attempt)! Dan, Steve, a customer at the shooting range, and I competed on two other scenarios and had an absolute blast. Or at least I did; I’m not sure how much they enjoyed losing.
Apparently there’s a range in Oregon with AccuShoot set up and they have Wednesday night competitions. It’s like Golden Tee or Top Shot or whatever and it’s a ton of fun!
The system is capable of talking with AccuShoot systems at other ranges, so in theory it could be very much like Golden Tee where there’s a national leaderboard and such. Your local range could gamify it and offer prizes for placing at the top of their leaderboard.
From immersive, legitimate LEO/MIL training to practice to fun, from hunting scenarios and games to shooting arcades to live video scenarios and much more, the AccuShoot system is pretty freakin’ amazing. It’s about $10,000 right now and the primary customer is shooting ranges and agencies, which is fine because I think it’s fair to say most of us can’t do live fire training in our homes anyway, but I think we can expect the price to come down as it becomes more mainstream. Which I hope it does, because it’s awesome!
Check out more at AccuShoot’s website HERE.
It has changed my range in Oregon. The first range to ever run it and I envision all of my lanes to moving to AccuShoot in the near future!
The use of projected targets and a camera / computer to detect and process the location of live fire shots (in addition to laser “shots” from a SIRT or other dry fire option like DryFireMag) has been around for quite a while. There are even ones that are used at long range (screen and projectors are downrange at the actual distance, projecting moving targets that are their actual size) to simulate sniper / countersniper situations, where you have to deal with instantaneous real world wind and weather, as well as any accuracy issues of your actual gun.
However, the price of such systems has been magnitudes higher than $10k, so hopefully we’ll see more ranges adopting stuff like this. Heck, with a big enough screen, you could do actual IDPA / IPSC or SASS stages with automatic scoring (and no risk of spall / ricochets from steel targets)!
My wife saw this and just informed me… “No, you can not set it up in the house!”
😁
There’s always the garage.
You obviously do not know my wife.