RE-liON - Super Cognition for Tactical Performance Optimisation
In this episode, we talk to Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations.
We discuss their perspective on Europe's rearmament efforts, the challenges they help solve for defence and law enforcement organisations, what super-cognition is and how human factors and decision science influence operational performance.
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Production, Design & Artwork: Hiatus ↗ The Defence Design & Communications Agency
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00:00:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hi, welcome to the Future Frontiers podcast from millilux.io.
00:00:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
In this episode, we talk to Christian Harmeyer, the founder and CEO of Relion, the European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision support systems for military and security organisations.
00:00:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We discuss their perspective on Europe's rearmament efforts, the challenge they help solve for defence and law enforcement organisations, what super cognition is, and how human facts and decision science influence operational performance.
00:00:38 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hey Chris, thanks for joining us on the Mill Lux Future Frontiers podcast.
00:00:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
To kick us off, please can you give us a really concise one-minute introduction to yourself?
00:00:46 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
One-minute introduction.
00:00:47 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Okay.
00:00:49 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Trained as an engineer, spent the last like 2 decades learning how we lead sports, first responders and war fighters perform under pressure.
00:00:59 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Is that sure enough for you?
00:00:59 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah.
00:01:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think that's possibly the shortest we've ever had.
00:01:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascic, can you unpack it slightly more for us in terms of, kind of the engineering side and especially the war fighters part?
00:01:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
That sounds cool.
00:01:14 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah, of course.
00:01:15 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So basically studied computer science, started a company really in the second year of my studies, not really knowing exactly what we would be doing, but I love like visualization and like measuring.
00:01:25 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Measuring for me is important as an engineer because if you don't measure, like how can you improve?
00:01:30 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So that was the first thing.
00:01:32 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Our university really has a department towards like rehabilitation.
00:01:37 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And from there, we jumped actually towards like the sports side.
00:01:40 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Rehabilitation is interesting because it's a lot of measurings, visualization, it's humans.
00:01:47 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And they had like a side department a bit focused on like peak performance.
00:01:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So elite sports.
00:01:54 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So what we did there was really like tie ripping like speed skaters in ice stadiums like full of sensors, visualizing their performance and trying to like shave off like milliseconds.
00:02:07 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And through there we got in contact with TNL, which is like the Army Research Laboratory.
00:02:13 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And they said like, hey, Chris, what you're doing right now is interesting, but can you also do sustained performance instead of like peak performance?
00:02:20 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So like, well, never done that before, but let's try it.
00:02:24 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And that worked out really, really well.
00:02:25 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So we did that actually for first responders and for war fighters, initially focused on education and training.
00:02:32 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
But then when we looked more, we actually also understood that there's the whole operational side that comes to it.
00:02:38 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And their performance under pressure is even more like important.
00:02:42 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
But it's harder because it's like often out of area.
00:02:46 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It's not in nice office buildings.
00:02:48 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So how do you design your equipment and your software for that kind of stuff?
00:02:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Plus,
00:02:53 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
These guys don't like things with a book or electric stuff or whatever.
00:02:57 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So they're really like analogue.
00:03:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating.
00:03:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating.
00:03:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm just to the midpoint of my master's in ergonomics and human factors, so decision science is one of my genuine passions about this.
00:03:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I can't wait to unpack this later on in the podcast.
00:03:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But to pivot the conversation a little bit, can I get your take on Europe's rearming efforts right now?
00:03:21 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah, It's interesting to see what's happening.
00:03:26 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It's been ongoing now for some time.
00:03:27 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It's still ramping up in speed.
00:03:29 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
I think the biggest issue right now that I see is that everyone's hair is on fire.
00:03:35 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We don't compete so much actually sometimes on product anymore, but really more fighting like on attention span of like key leaders.
00:03:43 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
I see a lot of like attention going out to companies that are focused on hardware platforms.
00:03:48 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So drones, fighters, ships, autonomy.
00:03:53 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
But in the end, the real bottleneck actually is still the human.
00:03:58 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We still don't have autonomy.
00:04:01 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
People talk about it, but it's mainly automation that we're seeing.
00:04:06 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So the issue is a bit, it's nice to have all those platforms, but without humans, you don't have anything to operate them.
00:04:13 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So in my point, we still need to take a better look at how 4th generation is broken and why we can't keep on doing the things we've always been doing.
00:04:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:04:22 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It gets me onto thinking about a previous conversation we had about the difference between humans in the loop versus humans on the loop, which is where we're almost pedestrian versus we're actually the decision makers.
00:04:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How do you see the kind of the next five years, say, of human-machine integration looking?
00:04:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
To pose you a challenging question.
00:04:42 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It's super fascinating, that question, actually, because the thing is, robotics, as we see it in Ukraine, is kind of like an evolution.
00:04:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Because it was already a bit there, but it's just going at a much faster pace.
00:04:57 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
There's still a ton of things that are being done by automation.
00:05:01 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That means actually really like one guy operating basically one machine, but now on a distance.
00:05:07 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So if you're looking at how the jobs to be done or the work that needs to be done by the war fighter and first responders will change in the future, I think it will change massively.
00:05:17 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Whereby it used to be a lot like boots on the ground, like directly to where the action happened.
00:05:21 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
I think it's now going to be at standard distance because in the end, the whole battlefield is like more and more lethal with drones flying around.
00:05:31 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It's just scary as hell.
00:05:34 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
The next step in this one is going to be, and that's the real force multiplier, is like when that autonomy kind of like starts hitting.
00:05:42 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And it won't be human off the loop, I think it will still be human on the loop, but not anymore, human in the loop.
00:05:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:05:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, I mean, we've definitely seen over the last five years, we've seen much more standoff between the front line, you know, and I guess there's always this conversation around the Iraq and Afghanistan era, that there was no front line because it was asymmetrical.
00:06:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I recall being in Mosul some 8, nine years ago when the operation to retake the capital from ISIS was happening.
00:06:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And actually, that was really the first point at which we saw drone warfare coming in to where they're coordinating vehicle-borne IEDs with the overhead drones.
00:06:21 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And so we see this gigantic melee whenever there's a drone flying overhead is that people would first try to shoot it out of the air and then start to think about cover when they realise that actually
00:06:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
the secondary threat was, not just it dropping a warhead or a mine or something like that from the sky was actually was there to coordinate a much bigger attack from a vehicle-borne IED.
00:06:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So we're seeing like a real evolution in my mind of where now it's becoming, that standoff is just becoming wider and wider, and back to the old days of being able to hide
00:06:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
in a woodblock or forest, it just seems so antiquated.
00:07:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I was like thinking this is the stuff of museum days.
00:07:05 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
No, but you're absolutely right.
00:07:07 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
I mean, in the end, there's basically two kind of like situations.
00:07:10 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
One is low-intensity conflict, that's kind of a bit like the Afghanistan or Iraq part.
00:07:14 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
The other part is more like large-scale combat operations.
00:07:16 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And in large-scale combat operations, I think the first phase is always going to be maneuver until basically both sides have parity.
00:07:22 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
If you have parity, which you see more or less right now in Ukraine, you have a bit of a frozen frontline.
00:07:28 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That means you can actually have that stand-off distance also.
00:07:32 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Again, I think there's a ton of things that will change.
00:07:35 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Also, if you look at demographics, we will have less and less people doing this type of work.
00:07:41 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
If you combine that, I think we're going to end up more with a force.
00:07:44 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Like infantry, for instance, I think it will change more into a smaller force.
00:07:48 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
which will be higher educated, like special operators capable or whatever that you want to call it, but really like highly trained.
00:07:55 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And I think the other force will be actually there to kind of operate that robotics part to support like that thing.
00:08:04 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Big change.
00:08:05 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah.
00:08:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I think from that, that's also going to put a lot of cognitive load on the operator.
00:08:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If they're working from, say, a big troop or platoon down to smaller decentralized groups that are operating systems of systems, we're seeing a lot more with obviously swarm tactics in the maritime environment, in the land environment, and obviously the environment that covers both of those.
00:08:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
As we're seeing, I agree, we're looking more like having a much more educated user who is using
00:08:34 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
many systems overlaid on top of each other to have an effect rather than just being part of a bigger battle group or system.
00:08:42 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
No, you're absolutely right.
00:08:43 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So the question for me is there's two things.
00:08:45 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
One is like, hey, how do you force generate actually that force?
00:08:48 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
How do you do that?
00:08:49 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Because you need to get them to a higher level.
00:08:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
But right now we already have a problem getting people like as fast as possible through that training pipeline.
00:08:58 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That's part one.
00:08:59 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
The second thing is how do you cope with the technology race?
00:09:01 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So how do you adapt as quickly as possible?
00:09:04 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
people are not always adept in doing that kind of thing.
00:09:08 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So these are, for me, the kind of like two main questions, like how do you solve that?
00:09:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah.
00:09:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And having taught phase one recruits in army training back some 15 years ago now, God, I can certainly speak firsthand and say it's not an easy or quick thing, you know, when you're talking about really complex abstract theories around,
00:09:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
how the eye works, how nuclear fission works, for example, all that sort of stuff, when it comes to people who've not really had that experience into the science world, then you'll then teach them about very kind of technical concepts, which take a long time for them to kind of inculcate it into their long-term memory.
00:09:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, completely agree.
00:09:53 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
People learn differently.
00:09:54 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Some people just learn based on text, but most of the people nowadays learn a ton better when they see like a visual problem set instead of just like a textual thing.
00:10:03 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So that is also kind of the thing that we are pushing.
00:10:05 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We are really focusing what we call supercognition.
00:10:07 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That's part one, it's kind of like sensing what that person does to better understand where they are.
00:10:12 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And can we speed up learning?
00:10:13 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Because learning is an efficiency kind of like progress.
00:10:15 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Or are we going too fast and is someone just not coping anymore?
00:10:19 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And the secondary thing is more the visualization part of it, like how can we visualize that problem set in an intuitive way?
00:10:25 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And then the cool thing is, if you do this properly, you can do it in a training setting, but you can also flip the switch and then it suddenly becomes like the operational setting.
00:10:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Real quick, if you want to hear when new episodes and articles are released, be sure to sign up to our newsletter at the Mililux website or find a link in the show notes below.
00:10:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But now, back to the episode.
00:10:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, that's actually a really good segue, actually.
00:10:50 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So my next question is, what is Rely On and how did it come to be?
00:10:56 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So really like what I mentioned, we started a company not 100% sure what we were going to be doing, but we had a skill that we knew well.
00:11:06 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So we were really like a pure play engineering company, learning and experimenting, like throughout that rehabilitation, sports, military training and operations.
00:11:15 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
I think the biggest change came really in 2022 with a large scale invasion in Ukraine.
00:11:24 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We decided to go in and really like not stand by and learn firsthand.
00:11:29 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It's not a comfortable situation, but it's a situation where you just learn the best.
00:11:34 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So we kind of like traveled in back and forth between the country.
00:11:39 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
What we learned there was that conflict, and that's what you see right now in Europe also, it triggered kind of a surge of at least like seven times in manpower need.
00:11:49 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We've seen also like what happens when there's not enough
00:11:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
manpower at that front line, because again, what we just mentioned, robotics is just not autonomous there.
00:12:00 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So that is kind of like how we learned, and we learned also to remove sometimes technology from our solution, because if you add too much of it, it certainly requires like large space or it requires somebody to operate it, but if you want to...
00:12:17 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
If you want to have the war fighter turn a bit of downtime into a valuable training opportunity, they need to be able to operate stuff themselves.
00:12:26 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And you cannot require, like, oh, dude, you need to be in this 30 by 30 meter space or whatever.
00:12:31 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
No, I sometimes just have one by one meter space.
00:12:34 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Like, what can I do there?
00:12:36 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So that's kind of like a change.
00:12:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, I was going to say, especially in an operating base where you don't have, you know,
00:12:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
and thinking back to kind of the days of Iraq and Afghanistan era, is that you don't have that massive space to go and just build, create a training scenario.
00:12:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
My final role in the Marines was as a training officer, and I can say that if you try to give very well-trained soldiers a less than
00:13:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
great training experience, you will lose a lot of credibility, face, trust, a whole lot of other things.
00:13:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
They'll just stop, they'll just be like, oh, the boss has wrapped on making interesting training for us.
00:13:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, you know, which is just, it's hugely expanded when you put yourself in an operational setting in a operating base somewhere very remote and, you know, away from any resources or anything.
00:13:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And also there's a danger element as well, is that if you start mixing up operational and training
00:13:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
environments, then obviously you're going to get probably at some point if somebody will put a live round into a magazine and you'll end up with a very difficult conversation to be had, let's say.
00:13:46 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
No, you're absolutely right, you're absolutely right.
00:13:49 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
One of the things that we find interesting is, and the question is like how you cope with that, it used to be centralized kind of like training systems, but what we are focused on really is like
00:14:00 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
How can we make that war fighter or law enforcement person or first responder really take advantage of the downtime opportunity whenever they're at their operational location?
00:14:09 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So whether it's a well deck or a need like a fob or something like that, that is the most interesting thing.
00:14:14 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And I think the only way to do that is by kind of embedding
00:14:19 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It's kind of like embedded training.
00:14:21 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So basically you do pull that switch or whatever, but you need to make sure from a safety point of view, just as you mentioned already before, like if you have a live round in there or if you have like a blank, there's a ton of difference safety wise.
00:14:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, for sure.
00:14:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
For sure.
00:14:34 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I guess probably just to just to kind of bring it all together a little bit.
00:14:38 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So you use essentially virtual reality, extended reality systems to improve the training readiness
00:14:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
understanding and decision making of the war fighter and law enforcement, law enforcement operator.
00:14:55 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Exactly.
00:14:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, brilliant.
00:14:57 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah, exactly.
00:14:59 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So that is like that is the visualization part of it.
00:15:02 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Then we have the sensing part and we are working on a third part for us.
00:15:05 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And that's actually really like the seamless human machine pairing, whereby we don't look at the autonomy part, but we look a lot at the user interface part of it.
00:15:17 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And that is super essential because if you're going to go into a situation where suddenly as a person I can come out and control like 100 like robots, how do I do that from a cognitive point of view without overloading that warfighter?
00:15:31 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And I don't want to continuously like steer that robot.
00:15:35 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
I just want to have it come back to me, ask me for a certain decision and then go.
00:15:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:15:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating.
00:15:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So are you able to, I realize this is probably quite a
00:15:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
a challenging question because you probably do a lot about what kind of problems do you does rely on solve for defense and law enforcement?
00:15:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Are you able to just go with like a really compressed kind of...
00:15:59 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah, the first, like if you're looking at a very simple way of stating it, it's right now it's really fundamentally upgrading like the capability of the OSHA protectors on the front lines.
00:16:09 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And we do that by replacing legacy systems that are like centralized
00:16:16 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
with this embedded like elite training directly integrated into Warfighter equipment.
00:16:20 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That is for us really like step one.
00:16:24 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And once we have that running, then we can also start on step 2, which is that seamless like human machine teaming part, because it will use exactly the same equipment.
00:16:36 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
If you look at right now what's happening in the front line, people are sitting there with their FP vehicles on in dugouts and shelters and whatever.
00:16:43 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It is essentially the same stuff.
00:16:47 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So again, there's a ton of benefit in combining things.
00:16:51 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
There's a ton of friction.
00:16:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
in regular infantry work, you need to look at those frictions and remove those.
00:16:57 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That's essentially what we are doing.
00:17:00 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And the reason is very simple.
00:17:02 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
There's just not enough people.
00:17:05 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We now talk a bit about the warfighter part, but if you're looking at, for instance, first responders and law enforcement, they will get that chance because national security will see, like, really the fallout of the technology arms race.
00:17:19 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Equipment like drones are now so cheap and accessible, you can easily weaponize it.
00:17:24 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
You just mentioned that VBID.
00:17:27 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Like, why would you still have like a kamikaze driver driving that thing?
00:17:31 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
You can just fly it in now.
00:17:33 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
You used to have these terrorist incidents or whatever where somebody would drive a truck into like a mass of people.
00:17:41 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Okay, but I can just now take a drone and do something like that.
00:17:45 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It is very, very scary because
00:17:49 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Are leaders in that area aware of like what you need to do to kind of like defend people like that?
00:17:57 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
I think not.
00:17:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, I completely agree.
00:17:59 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
When I was at the BBC, this is a problem which was very part of my part of ship because I was in charge of the security for bureaus, the 80 odd bureaus around the world.
00:18:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And one of my main concerns was, okay, so we have a bureau in
00:18:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
a country with a less than gleaming safety record, for example, what's to stop somebody taking the technology R&D from, you know, the Iraq-Afghanistan conflict and weaponise it to
00:18:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
take out, to ambush and take out a BBC journalist, in one of these places, either through a direct attack, literally flying in through a window and detonating or, just weaponised, and this is going back 10 years ago, was that there was people putting videos of 3D printed guns attached to a drone, and that was 10 years ago now.
00:18:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And, you look at, the Ukraine conflict and
00:18:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
this knowledge is now so pervasive that actually it'll be out there on the dark web.
00:18:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It wouldn't take very long for people to be able to reverse engineer this and do it for themselves, which is kind of still one of our concerns as well.
00:19:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So completely agree.
00:19:11 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah.
00:19:12 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
No, and the scary thing is that in a warfighter situation like a frontline, you sometimes have to take less care of collateral damage because there's just less people there.
00:19:23 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
But if you're talking about an urban society, you certainly have to think about all the collateral damage.
00:19:28 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Like what's going to happen when you kind of like try to take that out of the sky from a legal point of view already.
00:19:35 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So I'm really curious like how they're going to fix that.
00:19:38 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yes, yeah, for sure.
00:19:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, it does get me on to my next question.
00:19:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Are you able to kind of tell us a bit more about your products and services then in terms of make it as understandable for us as possible?
00:19:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Like have you got a separate thing which you're able to kind of share with us?
00:19:54 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We have basically like a man-worn kit, consists of a couple of pieces of hardware, like the XR device that we already talked about, a couple of sensors, super simple actually, integrates with like your weapon system, so your own organic weapon system.
00:20:08 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It integrates actually also with your own headset, it integrates with drone ground control stations,
00:20:14 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
even with your smartwatch to kind of like measure how you're doing.
00:20:18 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So that is the hardware side of it.
00:20:21 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We have a bit of software on top.
00:20:24 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And we kind of like started following Silicon Valley's playbook of delivering things as a service.
00:20:29 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And that is, that is, yeah, but that was first the, like combined with like that whole large scale combat thing in Ukraine, that was first really like the massive changer.
00:20:39 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We used to sell things, but the big problem of selling things is that certainly like
00:20:44 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
An M.O.D.
00:20:45 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
starts owning things, and that is the way they always operated, but the downside of that is certainly like obsolescence.
00:20:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So, what do I do after two or three years?
00:20:55 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
I need to upgrade that, and then if you...
00:20:58 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
If you look at those processes, they're like so long, that's impossible if you see the speed of technology.
00:21:05 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So we thought like, yeah, screw that.
00:21:06 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We're just going to do the two things.
00:21:08 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
One is disposal.
00:21:09 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That means it goes into a war zone or will never come back.
00:21:11 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Same thing like laptops and whatever there.
00:21:13 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
The other thing is as a service.
00:21:14 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That means we stay the owner of the hardware and the software.
00:21:17 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
The big advantage then is that we can just upgrade and update whenever we want.
00:21:21 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And that means right now it's like 2 a year, but sometimes even 4 a year.
00:21:26 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
There's no pressure anymore on like the acquisition organization of obsolescence, of like upgrade programs or whatsoever.
00:21:34 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That's all basically then up to us.
00:21:38 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And this works because if you focus on scalability, so focus on like, for instance, if you look at readiness, it's the basic skills.
00:21:45 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We cover like an 80% requirement.
00:21:47 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We don't do the last 20% because that's very specialistic and diverse per user, whatever.
00:21:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That means we can actually deliver it off the shelf.
00:21:54 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
You don't have to wait like 2 years to get something.
00:21:57 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
You can get it tomorrow.
00:21:58 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah.
00:22:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So we're always interested to hear from organisations that want to contribute their thoughts to our articles.
00:22:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If this is you, send it to the e-mail newsletter to stay up to date on what we're working on.
00:22:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
There's a link in the show notes.
00:22:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Otherwise, back to the episode.
00:22:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Fascinating.
00:22:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it's such a good concept when you think about it.
00:22:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Is that long...
00:22:19 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
having sat there in procurement meetings for the British MOD, I can say first hand is not a very quick process at all.
00:22:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So when you think actually is that you can scale up a, almost training as a service, decision making as a service, decision making development as a service, let's say, is that actually you can come in small, do a test case, you can get the first hand data from it and then
00:22:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
you dip your toe in the water and then actually say, actually, this is really good.
00:22:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Let's roll this out to other units who might have different training requirements, but actually 80% of their training needs are the same as Marines or same as Pirate ship regiment or same as this organisation or that organisation.
00:23:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's, you know, what do you do when you hear the sound of a drone?
00:23:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How do you, know, how do you use your separate piece of equipment if that piece of equipment is
00:23:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
operational and therefore not available for training in units.
00:23:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I'm thinking here of when we used to train our heavy weapon specialists, for example, with Javelin, is you'd have one, maybe 2 training simulators for the Javelin and it was a heavy piece of kit and it's always, dare I say, always breaking and very hard to maintain.
00:23:34 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So actually, if you're doing this in extended reality,
00:23:38 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
you're still training the same muscle memory, and what we're finding with, in decision science is that actually, as soon as that movement, that piece of knowledge gets encoded into the long-term memory, is that then it's then available for the working memory to use a lot quicker, and that increases that decision, you know, that feedback loop, the OODA loop from kind of old, if anyone's heard of, like, ODA loop, which is pretty much generic across all militaries these days, I'd imagine.
00:24:06 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah, Actually, the cool thing, Chris, is by the way, is that there's one thing that was missing actually from the OODA loop, but it's a bit of a tangent, the predict part.
00:24:14 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So the cool thing is if you look really at like your eyes and your ears, they're slower than your brain.
00:24:20 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So your brain kind of like already like predicts what the situation is going to be and then kind of like your eyes and ears kind of compensate for that and think like, hey, if that all matches or whatever, then I'm faster.
00:24:28 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
If it doesn't match, I get a small error correction and.
00:24:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
No, I totally agree.
00:24:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's a really good tangent because, the work into the unconscious, the unconscious, the system one, system two brain from Kahneman's work back, going back 25, 26 years ago now.
00:24:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
was that he understood that your unconscious brain is constantly taking in information around you, not what your peripheral vision can say, it's from your peripheral vision, but not what your conscious brain is recognizing, which is where the bad, the bad feeling when you're, we used to call it the absence of the normal, the presence of the abnormal, but it's a very hard thing to
00:25:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
communicate and comprehend because it's like it's like a it's like you walk down a street and you've got a bad feeling and you're like well I don't know why I've got a bad feeling about this because I always walk down the street and it was almost like a way of being able to kind of connect the unconscious to the conscious and say it's bad because of XYZ rather than just saying I've got a really bad feeling here but because I don't want to get on the bad side of the troop sergeant or the you know the section corporal for example I won't I won't raise it so actually it was undoing all those bad
00:25:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
habits of a culture to make sense that, one of my favorites was actually communicating to my Marines that every Marine is a sensor here.
00:25:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
There's no, there's no nothing stupid about having a bad feeling because, you know, you might, it might be that you've noticed something that no one else has noticed because they are so laser focused.
00:25:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
The brain, the brain, when it has a big dump of adrenaline, actually becomes less aware and less able to take in abstract information.
00:26:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You actually close off that peripheral vision.
00:26:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So
00:26:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You have to counter that.
00:26:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But that's my pushing down a different tangent.
00:26:15 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
No, but it is perfect and that is actually it has a very good like a link to what we're doing because like everything that we do is we try to give like those people future memory.
00:26:26 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So that means that once they are really there, they already know what to do.
00:26:30 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It goes into like that automatic system and they are more open then for like the unexpected parts that is and we've seen this like time.
00:26:39 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
and time and time again in every test that we've done.
00:26:43 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It works.
00:26:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:26:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'd love, I'd love, I mean, it'd be obviously very hard to create this kind of data, but to understand if there was like a group, test group that didn't have the ability to do to do constant XR training versus those that did, I wonder what the survivability metrics would be of both.
00:27:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Obviously, we'd never, you know, want to put, you know, people down into that space, but I'd be...
00:27:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
absolutely curious over it.
00:27:12 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We've done flying, for instance, with helicopter pilots in the Dolomites, and then we've checked really like flying with their existing PFPS planning system, which is kind of like two and a half dimensions.
00:27:23 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It gives them a bit of a coarse idea on like what it looks like.
00:27:27 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And our mission planning module, where they can see everything like in a razor sharp 3D.
00:27:33 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And the cool thing was really is that the differences in both flights was that in our flight,
00:27:39 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
they had exactly the right valley, exactly right estimates of steepness of landing zones, right landing spots, and they could even make more landings because of lower stress levels.
00:27:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How interesting.
00:27:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I may have to get in touch with the team in that case when it comes to my final research project on my master's, because that sounds something really interesting that I'd love to dive deeper into personally.
00:28:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But okay, so
00:28:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I realize time is quite against us right now, so I'm going to pose my penultimate question.
00:28:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
What do you see as the current problems and opportunities when we're working with NATO countries right now?
00:28:19 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Attention span.
00:28:22 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Attention span, decision inertia, key leaders is interesting.
00:28:25 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Key leaders are basically messaging like we need to change.
00:28:28 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
On the, like the operators on the ground, they are like up until here in change and work.
00:28:36 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And kind of like the mid-level is like where everything is kind of like stuck.
00:28:40 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So that is the biggest issue right now that we see.
00:28:43 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Stove pipe still.
00:28:45 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Simple example.
00:28:48 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Silly, we need to solve like counter UAS trading.
00:28:51 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Let's buy something for that gap.
00:28:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
But then they're buying something for that gap only, not for like the 20, like other things that there are.
00:28:59 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So people are to focus on requirements, not on solving problems.
00:29:05 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That is really, for me, the biggest issue that I kind of like see.
00:29:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Almost the same gap between the political layer and the actually the operational layer has kind of existed for a long time.
00:29:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And you'd hope that actually it's got smaller and that actually the people on the ground in the operational picture are saying we need to solve this problem better, faster, more affordably, or XYZ.
00:29:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And the political layer is just seeing a capability gap because it has to be seen to be filling that capability gap, sadly.
00:29:38 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I know
00:29:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
first time that media plays a part in putting that pressure onto the political level.
00:29:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I hope that does change in the future.
00:29:48 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah, and the cool thing is if we're still, and I think one of the reasons also is the inertia of doing the things they've always been doing.
00:29:54 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So really writing this long, like programmer requirements, doing like an analysis or whatever.
00:29:59 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
But hey, you can also just get things in as a service and just try it out.
00:30:03 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
If you don't like it, then it's like, bye, next thing.
00:30:06 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
But at least you're doing and you're moving things.
00:30:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yes, yeah, that's a really important point, isn't it?
00:30:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
That's the ability, if you've got long procurement cycles, and we've just seen it with the FCAS, the Future Combat Air Systems.
00:30:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But you know, that's not to say that the UK doesn't have a share of problems.
00:30:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You know, we've built, we've put hundreds of, we've put billions of dollars, pounds into the Ajax system, and then we put our soldiers in it and found actually that it
00:30:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
it has a terrible effect on their health, their well-being, and actually we have to, we can't put it into operational service.
00:30:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, this need to move faster, more decisively is, I think it's a pressure on all military these days.
00:30:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, you just kind of captured a really important point there.
00:30:52 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It is.
00:30:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I guess just to ask a difficult final question, what's the future for Rely on?
00:30:59 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Was not that different.
00:31:01 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We thought about that.
00:31:02 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
We are actually executing on our master plan.
00:31:07 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It's fascinating.
00:31:08 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
If you look out there, there's currently no prime focused on warfighters.
00:31:16 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
What we do is we focus on that warfighter, and then very specifically like the interface between that cognitive and physical world, because that's becoming more and more and more important.
00:31:25 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
So, for us, that is like really our main effort.
00:31:28 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
fixing force generation is really like step one, and then unlocking use really at the front line and enabling that seamless human machine teaming part.
00:31:37 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
That's really like step 2.
00:31:39 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
There are some other ideas also, but I'll leave it up there for now.
00:31:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'll take a guess at those future ideas.
00:31:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, having seen, so the US Apache that was shot down over or had to go down over the Straits of Hormuz a few days ago.
00:31:55 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Yeah.
00:31:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Apparently was they were the airmen were collected by uncrewed surface vehicle.
00:32:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I can definitely see there's a training needs analysis in the future for Royal Navy UES.
00:32:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
uncrewed systems operators to be able to use those things in challenging environments, whether on a say a warship in sea state fall and not getting motion sickness whilst controlling a multi-million pound platform that doesn't crash into a rock or some, you know, or crash into the, you know, into this ship.
00:32:29 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I could definitely see a, you know, a personal gap there that you guys could probably jump in and fill at some point.
00:32:36 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
No, there's a there's a ton of gaps, Chris, and you'll see this also say, for instance, if people need to be brought back from the front line in Ukraine right now, a lot of it's actually been done by UGVs, yeah, info, exfil, so it's getting really like ubiquitous.
00:32:53 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
And coping with that and how do you work with that, is the biggest challenge.
00:32:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, especially when you have the sensory feedback from being literally driving the car, or driving the truck, driving, the boat, for example, when you've got that sensory feedback where you can see the horizon, you can see distance.
00:33:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
There's definitely a big gap in need there.
00:33:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So brilliant stuff.
00:33:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, without further ado, Chris, thank you so much for joining us on the Milux podcast.
00:33:17 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We'll leave you to the rest of your day.
00:33:19 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Cool.
00:33:20 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Thank you so much, Chris.
00:33:21 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
It was a really great talk.
00:33:22 Christian Haarmeijer, the founder and CEO of RE-liON, a European defence technology company that develops immersive training, human performance optimisation, and decision-support systems for military and security organisations
Thanks, man.
00:33:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's really great talking to Christian.
00:33:26 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at HIATUS _, The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If you want to hear more about them, check out the show notes below and we'll see you next time.
