In some previous posts, I’ve discussed the progress of VR firearms training. Not only has VR hardware improved drastically over the last few years, but we’ve also seen specialized training software and hardware emerge. We’ve really reached the point where shooting in VR is realistic enough that it’s a lot like shooting a .22 LR at the range.

But, since writing those articles, I haven’t had a lot of spare time. I’ve only fired a few tens of thousands of virtual rounds in simulators like AceXR, and haven’t been able to do any real A to B testing with VR and the range. So, it could be argued that the realistic simulator’s ability to give you real skills you could use on the range hasn’t been thoroughly tested.

Fortunately, someone else had more time for this than me, and he’s shot more than 170,000 rounds. Then, he took his brain and hands to a competition to see if that practice has led to any real-world improvements in shooting. Check out the video and then read on…

Before getting into AceXR, he had only previously done one competition. So, he was at least able to compare the experiences from those. Then, instead of putting in a bunch of real-world range time, he went into the virtual world where ammunition is free and the range is only a few steps away from your living room. Then, he went out to a second match to see whether VR shooting helped, hurt or didn’t make any difference.

He then went through his match stages after training in VR. One thing he noticed right away was that the red-dot experience was realistic enough in VR that he was able to spot his mistakes and correct for them faster in the real world. Ideally, he would have gotten it right the first time, but being able to salvage the match and shoot a better second stage is better than not knowing what went wrong.

On the other hand, virtual competition software can’t give you the same benefit of experience that you might gain from talking to people at competitions. When there are complex stages, knowing what order to take the stage in and how to best manage time and accuracy/speed balance is something that you can’t naturally acquire shooting by yourself. So, he did identify one area where VR doesn’t prepare you (at least not yet).

But, on simple courses, he felt like Ace had prepared him fairly well. When facing a simpler “stand and deliver” stage, like the ones he’d spent a lot of time on in AceXR, he did his best performance of the day, moving up from 15th out of 60 to 7th out of 60. 

What We Can Learn From This

At the end of the day, it’s not really possible to come up with a technology that completely ends your need for live-fire training. Things like dry fire and more advanced VR shooting are extremely useful and can greatly accelerate your progression as a shooter, but you need to at least mix in some real shooting to keep the training grounded in the real world.

What Controlled Pairs is doing here is basically what you want to do. Get some real-world training to get grounded, do a mix of real and VR training, and then test it in the real world to see where you’re still coming up short. Getting better at anything is a process, and you can’t do it all in a day, but doing a mix of different things to get in more training time can be great.