Virtual reality, immersive electronic environments — they’re not just for kids games or grandpa crashing into the television set. A survey by the Government Accountability Office shows that most federal agencies are using immersive technologies for a variety of purposes. For the hows and whys, GAO’s director of science and technology assessment, Brian Bothwell, joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript: 

Brian Bothwell 
We were asked to look at how are the civilian agencies in the federal government using immersive technologies? So we sent out a survey to the agencies, and they told us about a lot of different uses that they have, both currently and their plans to do research and development on some future uses also.

Tom Temin 
Well, let’s define the term here, real, briefly, immersive. Well, I call it electronic environment. That is to say, I mean, you can be in submarine, that’s an immersive environment, but it’s real. This is where you wear of funny looking goggles, and you’re in the view that that provides.

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Brian Bothwell 
There’s an umbrella term for some of it. So there’s augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality, sometimes all lumped together and called extended reality. And that can range from augmented reality can be using a app on your phone to say, how does this couch look in my living room? That’s a piece of augmented reality, up to virtual reality, where you’re putting on some goggles, and you’re blocking out everything in the environment around you, and you’re in this virtual world. There’s a couple other immersive technologies out there. Also one is simulators that’s been out there for a long time, things like flight simulators. And there are also immersive caves, which are walls and ceiling around you that you walk into. It gives you this 3D representation of various things depending on what the program is running in the cave.

Tom Temin 
Almost like a tiny planetarium, if you will.

Brian Bothwell 
It is kind of like that. I went to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory near Denver last year, and they have one of those caves out there, and we walk through some very interesting examples of and you can actually walk around in the cave itself and see different aspects of this three dimensional simulation.

Tom Temin 
And did you find that agencies are using all of these various forms you’ve just described?

Brian Bothwell 
They are there’s a really good mix across many of the different agencies of different devices they’re using and different devices they plan to use in the future.

Tom Temin 
And this was a look at just the civilian agencies, correct, not DoD?

Brian Bothwell 
that’s correct. We did not look at the Department of Defense.

Tom Temin 
Well, give us some examples. You mentioned the Energy Department because they have a wide range of research going on. What are they doing there, for example?

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Brian Bothwell
We visited [National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)]. We saw them looking at simulations of power flow on a grid with various components of the power generation, renewables and others, and just see how different situations would affect the power flow on a grid. We also walk through a simulated wind energy field and showed how the atmosphere on the wind turbines would change. You would have just wind coming into the first set of turbines, but there’s another row of turbines behind them, and behind them. There’s a lot of interesting things that go on with the airflow. Those are just a couple different examples that we saw. Many other things are going on around the agencies, Homeland Security told us they’ve trained about 10,000 employees in various law enforcement techniques using immersive technologies. NASA has used Virtual Reality demonstrations of emerging technologies at public events for public outreach. The Department of Transportation is looking at superimposing data on a pilot’s view out the window, sort of a heads-up display type of thing. Another example is the Veterans Health Administration. They’re looking at the use of immersive technologies for medical treatment, for mental health, physical rehab and pain management, and they’re doing some research into how they can use those technologies to aid stroke survivors in recovery.

Tom Temin 
So it really is a wide range of mission connected things. It’s not just fun and games.

Brian Bothwell 
Right. There’s a lot of different uses, and we kind of categorize those in a report as to education, training, healthcare, design and construction is being used for that too. Data Visualization is a big one or several others.

Tom Temin 
We’re speaking with Brian Bothwell. He’s Director of Science and Technology Assessment at the Government Accountability Office. And did agencies say that they’re getting the hope for benefits from this technology?

Brian Bothwell
Yes, we got a lot of reports about the benefits. It was better data sharing. Sometimes there were reduced costs because you do remote collaboration, as opposed to having to collaborate in place, save a lot of money that way. If you can do that. They had a lot of good benefits. They also had some challenges that they told us about. Like with anything you have in a network, there are cybersecurity and privacy requirements that you have to meet, and that can sometimes be an issue. There’s also high costs purchasing, operating and maintaining the equipment, and there’s rapid tech development going on also. So these things are becoming outdated very quickly. So that really adds to the cost.

Tom Temin 
Did you come across any of those Apple devices that have got to be the most expensive headsets? Maybe only DoD can buy those?

Brian Bothwell 
Actually in the site visits that I went to, I did not come across the Apple headsets, but I did see one of the Microsoft headsets. And that was very interesting to see the headset use after being in the immersive cave, because it felt much, much more limited, because you had such a limited field of view. But of course, the caves are very expensive compared to headsets.

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Tom Temin 
Sure and headsets, I guess, well, I mentioned at the top, people have accidents physically when they’re wearing them, because they forget that they’re actually standing near a wall, and they go after something you can hurt yourself.

Brian Bothwell 
We heard that from a couple agencies too, about the downsides is that the disorientation, potentially or falling being injured while you’re totally immersed in this other environment is an issue they brought up.

Tom Temin 
And the latency, I guess, has been driven out out of a lot of these systems, so that the issues of seasickness, nausea are maybe less than they were years ago.

Brian Bothwell 
And that brings up an interesting counter to that, I mean, the other side of that is there’s a lot of dependency on the enabling tech to use this stuff. You need a lot of computing power behind it in order to make it work.

Tom Temin
You made made no recommendations. But what did this tell you at the macro level? This look, see?

Brian Bothwell 
We just did the most comprehensive review. What’s going on in the federal civilian agencies of this use of immersive technology, we were able to get all the information from our survey and from follow on conversations with the agencies and some of the site visits to put it all in one place. This is a very long report, not the link that we like to put out there, but it’s full of great information. It has several appendices which talk about what is going on at the agencies who are using this in a lot of detail, and especially in a lot of detail, if you look at the NASA appendix. So there’s a lot of information out there that really lays out what is going on in the federal civilian agencies. Like I said, we didn’t make any recommendations, but personally, I was really surprised that there was so much happening in the agencies and so much more planned to happen.

Tom Temin 
Your report is 180 pages, which is kind of long for GAO, but luckily, you can link, and it’ll jump right to the department or agency you might be interested in.

Brian Bothwell 
I think the main part is about 30 pages, 30 pages long, but there’s, like I said, we’ve got tons of good information those appendices, and so the public and our congressional clients can, you know, jump around in there and see exactly what they want to see, which topics, which agencies.

Tom Temin 
Since there was no major program or fraudulent activity or out of control procurement involved, what do you think the congressional sponsors were seeking in this particular request?

Brian Bothwell 
I think they wanted to know what’s being done, what advantages are, what obstacles may be in the way they’re preventing agencies from actually proceeding with some of these.

Tom Temin 
But in general, the agencies found it beneficial?

Brian Bothwell 
Yes. Mostly they found it beneficial. Like I said, there were some downsides. We found that of the 23 civilian agencies, 17 were using immersive technologies in some way. Fifteen of them planned to adopt or expand their use of that. But one-third of the agencies, approximately eight of them, said they didn’t think it was likely or they weren’t sure about further adoption or or expansion, because those difficulties I talked about before, the cost and the cybersecurity.

 

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