Recruiting Gets a New Life Online

The Vancouver Police Department turned to virtual reality recruiting to attract savvy young recruits. The results gained worldwide attention. Here's how they did it.

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"Luddites in policing beware: the train is leaving the station," he wrote. "It is imperative that IT becomes a prime consideration in all aspects of the public safety service delivery chain."

Another supporter of the project was Howard Chow, a Sergeant in Recruiting who was a spokesperson for the VPD at the time the seminar was held. At a press conference announcing the initiative, Chow told the media, "We're at a crossroads right now. Old techniques and old ways of doing things aren't working and we've got to look outside the box, and this is what the Second Life recruiting seminar is all about."

Strong Supporting Cast

In order to create the Second Life seminar, the VPD enlisted the aid of experts from the Masters of Digital Media program, headed by director Gerry Sinclair. The program, offered at the Great Northern Way Campus, an emerging digital village in the heart of Vancouver, is a collaborative initiative involving Simon Fraser University, the University of B.C., Emily Carr School of Art, and the B.C. Institute of Technology.

"We have a virtual university campus in Second Life, and we were able to host the VPD seminar on it," said Joanna Robinson, a research assistant with the Masters of Digital Media program and a key contributor to the project. "We helped them run the session, made things like custom uniforms for them, and got a video made of the event."

In order to get accurate looking uniforms, photographs of real uniforms were taken from a variety of angles. These were imported into Photoshop, where the outfits were created and eventually imported into Second Life and put on the avatars of the three VPD officers involved in the event: McQuiggin, Detective Cherie Duggan, and Inspector Steve Rai.

"Not only did we Photoshop the textures for the shirt and pants, but we also created a utility belt with things like their gun and mace on it," said Robinson. "We also created a virtual duffel bag to give to seminar visitors containing information and goodies, like a VPD T-shirt that they could put on their avatar."

Visitors could even relax with a cup of virtual copy as they attended the session, although to avoid the stereotype, no donuts were on offer.