POBS

Inspiration

Our inspiration behind our Police Officer Bias Simulator (POBS) was to address current police brutality issues ongoing in America today. We strive to remove the cultural, racial, and gender biases that greatly influence police officer actions. In light of the Black Lives Matter movement, our group has decided to target the source of the problem with our idea. Studies have shown that the current methods of implicit bias training are both short-term and ineffective due to them usually being taught in a classroom setting. In addition, police officer training mainly focuses on physical training, which inevitably results in them resorting to acting on their long-term biases with muscle memory once in the field.

What it does

POBS simulates an officer's encounter by allowing them to use the AR application function to see a geographically simulated scenario in real life and real time. After reading a scenario they are forced to use their own initial instincts to respond to the situation. After they have made their decision, they will be shown the impact their action and decision had on the parties involved.

How we built it

For our project, we mainly focused on creating a prototype through Figma. We created a base AR app and accessed the 3D object models we had on our echoAR via JavaScript fetch request, which include people and different weapons that a police officer would normally have on hand in the hopes that we would be able to display these when a police makes the appropriate action. In the end, we were able to put in a link to the AR simulator containing the object on the page following the sign in, which would have been one of the choices in a given scenario. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we were only able to make a request to the echoAR API but were unable to implement the functionality to our base app.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we encountered while making POBS was deciding whether to create a VR or AR application. Our experience was limited in the VR realm and we struggled creating a simulation within Unity. Due to time, we were forced to regroup and switch to the AR route allowing us to utilize our already developed skills and were able to successfully create a working prototype. In addition, we were unable to implement EchoAR into our apps prototype due to errors integrating the code with our Figma prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud of going outside our comfort zone and attempting to use EchoAR as we had no prior experience to it before doing the Hackthon. We are also proud of creating a working prototype in order to convey our idea.

What we learned

Our team learned the essential skills of how to implement and use EchoAR. We also learned some of the basic functionalities of Unity.

What's next for POBS

In order to create a more efficient implicit bias based training simulation for police officers, we hope to make POBS into an actual Virtual Reality application that fully immerses officers in the scenario. This would allow officers to have more freedom in the actions they take by actually having the ability to interact with the simulation. This will allow the effects of their actions to have a greater impact on them as well.

Built With

• echoar
• figma