Using VR to train a real world skill - Clay Shooting

Gaming
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A bit of backstory, about 3 years ago I got into clay shooting with American trap and skeet. It is not a cheap hobby, I average about 80 cents a target all up (and that’s just per target club fees and ammo). To save money, I spent the money to get a clay thrower, and a buddy with a large chunk of land is cool with me shooting there, so I can shoot for just the cost of ammo which is around 32 cents a shell. With just one thrower I can only practice trap (which was/is my main interest so it was okay). Which is cheap enough that it’s affordable, but it’s still not cheap and it’s a bit of drive. Sporting clays and five stand is another discipline that I’ve tried, but I find I am basically making noise and spending money to accomplish little. I need the practice to get reasonable at it, and practice is expensive (as I have to go to a club to practice) so I don’t do it much. Cue a circle of low performance. I took most of last year off from any serious clay shooting due to the combination of time and cost.

Onto the VR sim’ing part of this. I have the mobile version of Clay Hunt that I picked up on a whim for a couple of bucks a year or two ago, and saw they had a VR option back when I didn’t have a headset.

Clay Hunt VR on Meta Quest | Quest VR Games | Meta Store

Now that I do have a headset, I figured I’d give the 30 minute demo a try and see how it was. It took a grand total of 2 minutes to convince me to buy it once the demo was done. Yes, using to VR controllers is not an ideal replica of how a shotgun swings in the hand when shooting, but it’s surprisingly workable. Enabling the gun trace to see your swing, firing point, and where the pattern was in relation to your target is incredible.

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This is taken from the web as I haven’t the faintest idea how to record off my headset. You can see the red for the path of the muzzle pre-shot, gray is post-shot, the red dot is the shot point, the gray ghost clay is the clay’s location when the shot is fired, and the reticle displays the shot pattern in relation to the clay, and its engagement distance. There are purpose-built training systems that do this with projectors and lasers, and they run into the thousands of dollars, but you can use your actual shotgun to train with.

Five minutes of looking on the web, and there are solutions for this as well. The two built in options in Clay Hunt VR are the Real Stock Pro VR

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and the MegaVr Duck Hunter

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Both have some very good reviews, and are considered serious training tools with appreciable real world carry over. They’re not cheap at ~$300, but the cost and time savings of doing this virtually is immense. I can shoot 100 practice targets in my living room for effectively free. Time wise it takes me 45 minutes to an hour to go be able to shoot at either my buddies place or the local clubs, and that’s just to get there. In 45 minutes I can shoot 100-150 quality practice targets with excellent feedback in the comfort of my living room, any time of day, any day of the week. I shot for about an hour this morning after work at 0520, and it was great

Doing the math, the entire outlay for my headset, a stock kit, the simulator itself, would pay for itself in about 2300 practice targets (and that’s just in pure ammo savings). This morning I shot about 200 targets, and learned something on almost all of them for a cost of 0 dollars. If I shoot 100 targets each morning when I get home from work, 4 days a week, I’ll have the cost saving in 6 weeks roughly.

I am currently (well last time I went to the club 16 months ago) a 90 out of 100 trap shooter at the 16yd line, which is pretty pedestrian (or less lol), with the occasional flash up to 93-94. I am curious if after 2 months of VR training what it will do to my average. I’ll keep you guys posted.

I need to order a stock set. Using the VR handsets by themselves has me over swinging my virtual gun due to the massive difference in weight. I don’t want to build any bad habits, which apparently can happen, so I won’t be too hardcore with anything till my stock set arrives.

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Very cool! Do report back what your experience is like over time.

Curious whether you’d get better tracking with a controller that utilized two handsets, or a single? I could argue either way in my head.

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Thanks so much for the great write-up. That’s something that I’d definitely like to try. Being a fighter jock’s kid, I grew up on Air For bases, where there was always at least one skeet range. In fact my brothers and I worked at them when we were in high school.

Cool fact, it gets really interesting inside one of those range houses when a target either explodes during a throw or comes out of the arm late and hits the inside of the house while you are in it. Gets your attention while you are waiting for it to cycle so you can load a stack of clays :crazy_face:.

As far as a VR stock, has anyone given thought to putting some sort of artificial recoil in the butt? That would be ultra immersive.

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Cool!
Questions…
Why are only a few gun stocks compatible? I mean, you can shoot with just the hand controllers? A gun stock is just a holder for the hand controllers, with some added weight?
Well… Search Thingiverse - Thingiverse

Have you compared your real world progress, since starting VR shooting? Does the skill learning in VR transfer into real life?

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Replying on my phone, so apologize for butchered text in advance.

The MegaVR Duck Hunter actually has an optional forward handset mount for the second controller. I just screen caped a pic that didn’t have it mounted. I’m assuming you get better muzzle control defining the “bore axis” with two points.

Jeez, I don’t like that last couple stations of skeet standing next to the low house and I’m out of the frag path lol.

Answering your questions out of order, yes you can just use the hand controllers. It’s what I’m doing currently. Any stock will work, those two have presets to allow for an easier setup.

An analogy would be learning to bat in American baseball in VR. If you trained yourself perfectly to observe the ball from release to contact with the barrel of the bat using a simulated bat that only weighted 4 ozs, you would have some transferable skills. But you’d have to adjust a lot of things to swing a bat 8 times heavier to hit a real pitch even if the ball flew identical to the VR version.

If all I was trying to do was get good at shooting virtual clays with a virtual shotgun then yes any setup I felt comfortable with would be fine. As I’m attempting to do this to improve me RL performance, having a stock the provides something akin to the real world weight and balance of my RL shotgun is desired. Using a 3D stock with minimal weight, I’d have the same issue I have with just using the hand controls of over driving the muzzle past my intended point. My brain is firing the neural pathways to move a 30" long steel barrel on a 9lb shotgun, which leads to way over shooting with a pair of plastic handsets. Having a stock that mimics the weight, balance, and to an extent feel, should allow for a transferable set of “reactions.”. I basically have the reverse problem of my baseball analogy. I know how to swing the bat for real, and my timing is way off when I’m using just the handsets.

There are some companies doing that I’ll put a link in when I get up in the afternoon. For this I don’t think it would do much as recoil control isn’t too major of a part of the sport (assuming your gun fits right).

I have not, I literally stated on this journey yesterday morning (Monday). I know systems that use projectors etc to accomplish the same thing are used a the professional level, so I’m assuming people do see results if those things keep selling.

Once I get my stock I’ll probably give it a month of solid practice and see how I shot compared to my normal averages.

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What I meant with that is that it’s the handcontrollers that are tracked. The stock doesn’t add anything but a holder for the handcontrollers, weight and feel. Which, of course, makes me think that you could make your own stock. You know me… :wink:

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In fact the anticipation of recoill can be detrimental. The "shot’ should be a surprise.

It took archery for me to learn this properly.

Sorry to wade in with a random comment.

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3d printer time :grinning:… there are a few a files for controller “stocks” on thingyverse

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Yeah, I linked to a thingyverse search earlier. And One could take just the hand controller holders and add them to a real stock…

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Oh believe me that was my initial thought, as I have a couple spare stocks laying around. Looking at how they had done it, it’s not complicated, I could weld a steel frame rather than do the aluminum channel, etc. However by the time I had finally got a version that I liked and worked well, I’d have easily exceed the cost in labor alone, and it would have taken me 3 months where I could have been practicing.

Downloaded a set of controller holders on Sunday before reality caught up with me lol.

I am absolutely not ruling out making my own stock, I just want to get started practicing in earnest.

Yep, and if you look into the curious item of “release triggers,” they’re a mechanical “fix” for people who fail to have good fundamentals and won’t take the time relearn them properly and want a hardware fix to a mental issue. Not that I think they are dangerous and should be banned or anything…

Shot 3 rounds of trap, hovering around 18/25 with one 20/25. Overswinging the barrel got me several times, but I am cleaning up a failure to add lead on “straight aways” when I’m shooting from the pegs off center. So that’s a real world problem I’m learning to fix. Also ran 25 targets from the far right peg throwing right, which I always have issues with.

Shot a round of skeet (cause why not), 20/25 and held it together largely till the last few pair. Just need to practice those presentations more. And finished with about 40 targets of sporting, love the weird angles, and I think I finally figure out rabbits (targets rolled along the ground). So overall about 200 targets in less than an hour.

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You’re definitely putting food on the table with 20 and above. A good round for me is 23ish. Having said that, I watched dad break 100 in a row, before missing on 101. I swear that he did that by design, but he denied it as long as he lived. Kept his cards close to his chest I think.

On the importance of having some sort of recoil and the need for a stock, I would say, why have a force feedback flight stick or steering wheel? Not a deal breaker, but IMHO, the more that you can emulate the real life mechanics, the better the sim will be. Looks at the cheap lightweight Turkish over and under shotgun collecting dust in the gun safe. Remember how you hurt me.

I watched a review of Clay Hunt VR to get a feel for the experience. Lots to like here. Of course the reviewer didn’t have a clue what he was doing, giving a gamer’s POV. One thing that concerned me is how the shooter did not get his head down on the shotgun, something I have to remind myself to do occasionally, especially when hunting, not that I’ve done a lot of that since the kids were born. Is the player forced into that view or can one actually look down the rib if the gun was mounted properly?

This reviewer’s mechanics are a lot better.

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If I was going for immersion, 100% in agreement. For shooting trap singles in particular the recoil just disturbs my ability to (hopefully) watch the clay disolve. For something like doubles or sporting there is an element of recoil control, but I’d consider it minor at best compared to the “action” shooting sports.

No, you can get your head down flat on stock. It takes a much more conscious thought with the controllers as your hands end up in a bit of a weird place in comparison to where they’d actually be with a real stock. You can add high ribs and mid beads to the gun in Clay Hunt VR as well. I shoot with the figure 8 front bead on top of mid bead IRL, and I can do that in game, with just the controllers I have to be deliberate in getting setup before I call pull to keep that site picture.

Check out The Best VR Gunstock and Accessories by ProTubeVR. They have all kinds of recoil options apparently.

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@Troll and @tempusmurphy, I swear you are as deserving of the bad influencer as some other people around here…

Rather than spend time at work tonight figuring out what stock to get, I spent it figuring out how to make one.

Which of course means I’m probably going to end up doing both!

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I could see that having a 3D printer and some aluminum profile, it would be a fun project. Extra credit for access to a wood shop and having the skills to use it. This seems right in @Troll 's wheelhouse.

That a really cool looking haptic module. Hmmm. The price though…

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that price … is as you say bloody steep …

trip to homebase (home depot) for some 20mm plumbing pipe and some angle joints and a 3d printer… sorted :grinning:

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Well I at least finally figuring out how to hit the virtual clays with the hand controllers.

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I am embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of this:

VR controller ‘Hand Strap’ gun stock stability mod for two-handed guns (Pavlov, Contractors, Onward) (youtube.com)

until I saw this video and it works like a charm. I am still working on a stock design, as the weight is definitely still needed if I want this to translate to the real world.

Interesting data point, I can shoulder my real shotgun (well one of them) without disturbing the head set. I am thinking I can actually make a set of connectors to hold the handsets to the shotgun, with some sort of trigger mechanism going across to activate the handset trigger.

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VR technology has finally reached a milestone: the first VR-induced ND! :joy: :rofl:

(All kidding aside:) The issue I see would be the alignment of the controllers- wouldn’t your VR gun be offset from the actual firearm?

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:joy:

Clay Hunt VR actually allows for a lot of adjustments regarding where the controllers are in relation to the gun model in sim. I don’t know how wide that latitude is, but it’s worth checking out. Also the dev is apparently very active in the discord, so it probably wouldn’t be hard to get in touch to see about adding a wider adjustment span.

My initial idea is to basically have them be the offset by the width of the halo to one side of the shotgun. I’m not sure if they’d still be trackable by the headset if they are partially behind the receiver and the firing hand one is only a few inches away from the headset. Nothing a little duct type can’t test out lol.

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Ah, you might be on to something then! Cool.

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As @warpig alluded to, just make sure to put any live ammo in another room. Rules written in blood and destroyed furniture :laughing:

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