Oregon Indoor Shooting Range in Lebanon just upped the ante by providing a new, AI-driven technology that allows shooters to fire live rounds at moving targets and receive analytics that challenge them to do better.
The system, AccuShoot Live Fire Experience (LFX), comes from Francisco Martin, a reserve deputy for Benton County Sheriff.
“This is like the Xbox for adults,” Martin said.
As his patented technology gains momentum, Martin has been invited to demonstrate AccuShoot around the world, including invitations by several different law and military forces. Currently he’s preparing for a trip to Finland which, he noted, is close to Russia and is preparing for any possible conflict with their neighbor.
The new owner of Oregon Indoor Shooting Range (OISR), John Jones, said that what makes the system so special is the fact you are shooting at a screen with live rounds. The AccuShoot platform is managed on an iPad and projected onto a portable cardboard screen, while an infrared camera and AI technology accurately track the location and timing of each shot, allowing users to track their own data as well as compete with each other.
Darrell Barnard, a self defense firearm instructor at OISR, said the system helps with shooter skills “big time” because one of the most important aspects of defensive shooting is being able to transition.
“I like teaching people how to shoot and this is just a perfect little opportunity to be able to build people up and give ‘em challenges,” Barnard said. “It takes you outside your comfort zone. I’ve seen some very, extremely high-end shooters come in here and they find a challenge in some of these games.”
According to Jones, several area law enforcement agencies have tried the system and provided positive feedback, including a lead instructor with Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training (DPSST), who said if they could get the system in their training, it would be “a game changer.”
Jones first featured the system with a special event in August, and has since been offering it every Wednesday.
A second special event to showcase the LFX will be a fundraiser, “Friday Night Frights,” on Friday, Nov. 1, from 3-9 p.m. Cost is $1 per game ($5 minimum) with a chance for competitors in each category (based on age, gender and sighting system type) to win an annual membership with AccuShoot and Oregon Indoor Shooting Range. Half of the proceeds will go into a prize pot while the other half will be donated to the Veterans Home in Lebanon.
“It enhances your training a whole lot, shooting at a moving target,” Jones said, adding he’s noticed a difference in his skill since he started playing. “There’s different drills and it pushes you to want to do better.”
AccuShoot LFX includes about 40 different drills with games depicting ghosts or pumpkins, traditional silhouettes, dots, bubbles that split apart, live police dash cam videos, and more.
Barnard finds that people get bored with paper targets. Steel targets, he noted, are popular because the shooters get some type of feedback with the pinging sound it makes.
“Paper, you’re poking holes in a piece of paper,” he said.
But adding LFX’s digital component, and even comparing it to “live fire exercises” which use laser guns, Barnard noted how AccuShoot games provide different and variable levels of feedback.
“The difference is that you actually are getting to shoot actual firearms with actual rounds, you’re feeling every bit of the impact of that gun, and then you got all these different stressors, which are super important for successful self defense, and law enforcement especially,” Barnard said. “Law enforcement and military, they need that kind of training. I personally believe, being a self defense firearm instructor, that people just need that type of feedback with the gun and get into the moving targets because in reality, if you come up against a threat, is that threat gonna be standing still like a piece of paper?”
Then there’s the dash cam drills, which are mostly intended for law enforcement training, Martin explained. Using patented technology, AccuShoot transforms real footage into a training system that can detect where the shots are fired.
He pointed out that many law enforcement agencies use a similar digital system for training, but the scenarios are played out by actors and the guns used are laser or CO2 systems. Martin added that the current digital training systems become boring and the students stop paying attention as sharply as they should.
By using live fire, agencies can train with moving scenarios while experiencing the kickback of their own guns. Even more so is the fact that the dash cam drills provide actual, real-world footage of an incident that occurred, Martin said.
“You can see how bad the world is and how demanding sometimes people are of law enforcement… these kind of things where the encounters are very fast, it grows very quickly and you need to make these split-second decisions,” he said.
Martin has seen shooters focus too much on one person in the dash cam game, while others will shoot everything. The fast-paced encounters challenge a shooter to be able to observe where the target truly is and respond appropriately.
“Most of the training nowadays is with targets that don’t move,” he said. “In a real world scenario, everything is gonna be moving, everything is gonna be very dynamic, and people don’t train for that. So I think we are increasing the level of sophistication in training.”
Martin said this is the only technology of its kind in the world, and Jones looks to the future when he would be able to offer the service in each of his six lanes.
“Everybody who’s seen it has been blown away,” Jones said. “We’ve had a lot of law enforcement that came through when he was developing it and they were like, ‘Oh my gosh. We would love to have something like this,’ because it’s a lot different than just shooting a paper target.”
While Jones agreed the dash cam games are perhaps the most exciting game to play, he prefers to play “Ghosts,” which involves different colored ghosts with different point values, including one color that means “don’t shoot,” which trains the player’s ability to think while shooting. Recently, he and Martin competed against each other and ultimately achieved the highest level, so they went back to the drawing board and created a way to go higher in level by measuring the timing of each shot.
Martin’s LFX system records the location of each succession of shots, how many misses you had and how long it took to take a shot. Plus, he noted, it’s much quicker to set up a new round as opposed to the traditional targets.
“Now when I see the videos of people training with paper targets or cardboard, you say, ‘Oh my goodness, that is so old fashioned,’ because you need to go and look where the input is, and you cannot measure anything,” he said.