Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 49

BUSINESS OUTLOOK WEEK OF MONDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1989 Page 1 7 111 -1 it' foA ALEXANDRIA KING OUTLOOK ice at ICAT, where he produces police training videos; above, Patricia Grebe, who where she creates designer play furniture for preschool children. the body, the bad guy is only wounded and may come back again to shoot at the trainee. The student doesn't see these zoning marks while the video is playing. Nor does he or she see the fall of fire, but the computer does. After the exercise, the operator can play the scene back, this time showing the student where the laser bullets hit and how long it took him or her to respond.

The computer operator can alter the sce: narios by chosing one of the many variations on a scene, which are the product of what Lindsay calls interactive video branching. Some scenarios can branch as many as 25 ways and yet take less than three minutes to play through. "Shooting at a paper target (traditional police training) is not stressful. It's not interactive. There is no time element involved.

In a training environment like this, you have to respond and respond accurately or you're history," said designer Lindsay. High-tech though the system is, it is also easy to use. "Anyone who can type two letters in a row can use it," said Bob, who does not claim to be a computer expert himself. This video disk has five scenarios. Each year, Apogee plans to produce three new video disks with three to seven senarios each.

In addition to training police officers, ICAT is developing senarios for SWAT teams, and other special operations groups. Each disk will cost $2,000. Customers of the $30,000 ICAT Apogee System include police departments in Reno, Aurora, and Louisville, the Ventura County Sheriff's Department and Criminal Justice Colleges in Colorado and California. Future customers, said Bob, are the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the U.S. Navy and Air Force, the FBI, DEA Training Agency and the Secret Service Training Academy.

He has received inquiries from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India and Sweden. Currently, ICAT has two sales people traveling throughout the United States and Canada in cargo vans. By the first quarter of next year, Bob hopes to have five. Almost every time he gives a demonstration, someone asks if he or she can buy an Apogee System for their den. The answer was originally no, but Bob has started working on an interactive video system just for fun.

A lot has changed since February 1987, when Bob struck up a conversation with Pat on an airplane. By the time they were married, each had a new business, and they decided to keep them both. "When one of us feels busy and overwhelmed, the other helps out," Patricia said. Although the businesses are demanding, Bob and Patricia make time to spend with each other, and they avoid talking business at home, Patricia said. They play golf.

They take dance lessons. "The lessons are for my benefit," said Bob. "She was the U.S. Champion Ballroom Dancer of 1981." large room is sparsely furnished. A personal computer system and attached video disk player is on the desk.

The projector is attached to the ceiling, and a screen is on the far wall. The trainee holds a weapon either a .357 Magnum, or a shotgun retrofitted to fire laser beams instead of bullets. When the gun is fired, the video camera on the ceiling picks up signals from the lasers and feeds them into the computer, which determines where the fall of fire would be. The scene on the screen responds by shifting to one of several scenes recorded on a video disk the bad guy may fall dead, be wounded, or continue firing. He could drop the gun but grab a hostage, or he could beg for mercy, depending on how well the trainee shoots and what scenario the trainer choses from the computer menu.

"It's as close to real life as you can get," said Bob Grebe. ICAT's system has been named one of the top three technologies of the year by the British government in a competition for the 1989 Archimedes Award. Before ICAT's cfeation of the Apogee Interactive Video training system, the only training videos on the market were the standard "ShootNo Shoot" systems. A trainee would watch a crime in progress. For example, a robber runs from a bank; the trainee orders him to halt; the man turns.

If he is holding a gun, the trainee should shoot. If he is not, the student should hold his fire. The video stops there. "That's called the old freeze-frame technique," said Bob. "It's not very realistic." His idea was to create more true-to-life scenes that require good judgment, good marksmanship and quick thinking.

Before Apogee, the only way to test these skills was by going out on the streets. "Police nationwide, recognize the need for this type of training," Bob said. "There have been a number of court suits that showed that the police department was negligent in training people." Bob is a Vietnam war veteran, a former television reporter, and a former stock broker and financial planner. Patricia's computer-whiz brother, Randal Lindsay, designed the system. With the help of tactical adviser Russell Showers, the team wrote several scenarios a confrontation in a parking garage, a domestic dispute in a private home, a rape scene in a family den, and two brothers and their families making drugs in an old house.

The latter is for SWAT teams. Bob hired professional actors to perform these scenes and took hundreds of hours to shoot what ends up as a two- or three-minute scene. Lindsay used a computer mouse to draw around the figures on the irideo screen with digital codes. Each area is zoned with its own value. If the trainee's laser bullets strike the figure in the eyes, nose or chest, for example, the bad guy falls dead.

If the laser hits him in the firing arm, he drops his weapon and begs for mercy. If the laser hits anywhere else in fc RS Twist get financing to move the plant to Albuquerque in January, when business is slow. The operation would provide 44 jobs, she said. The city has offered low-interest loans, Patricia said, "but we need equity capital as well. I would like equity to match what the city is willing to do.

I'm diligently talking to people every day." Since June 1988, the same month the Grebes were married, American Ingenuity has expanded from five employees to 20. And anyone interested in the best-selling table shaped like a baseball glove with matching baseball-shaped stool has to take a number and stand in line. During the time she was ill, Patricia worried that her business would die, but with Bob and her employees minding the store, she returned to find "orders coming in regularly. Our groundwork is starting to pay off." When you walk down the hall from Patricia's office to the ICAT training room, it's like passing into another dimension. The i- accounts" as well as 1,100 inquiries she hasn't answered because she can't yet increase production.

"We're capitalizing on the baby boom," Patricia said. Adults in the 1980s tend to establish careers before having children, which means they have more disposable income. They can afford to spend $79 to $300 'y for a Bear Chair or play castle, she said, Despite her success, Patricia has faced a lot of hurdles. Last spring, she was ill and required surgery. It cost her more than two months at work while husband Bob and her employees filled in.

There also were trials in the manufactur-' ing process. 111 Patricia tried to work with two subcontrac-a tors. The first "went out of business by not really being able to do my project, but accepting my work anyway," she said. "The second one went to market with a competitive in product." a In Oklahoma, she found a manufacturer f- who met her standards of quality and recent-it ly bought the operation. Now she's trying to.