Background
On 8 September 2026, at the opening of the Home Team Academy's workplan seminar, Singapore's Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs, Edwin Tong, said the academy's training facilities would be updated with the development of a Home Team Virtual Shooting Range. The academy is the central training institution for Singapore's Home Team and marks its 20th anniversary in 2026; it trains officers from agencies including the Singapore Police Force, the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority, the Central Narcotics Bureau and the Internal Security Department.
What the range does
The virtual range is intended to complement live shooting rather than replace it, letting officers train with realistic weapon replicas that reproduce recoil and sound. The academy said it will let officers sharpen their decision-making under pressure through shoot-or-no-shoot scenarios, in which a trainee must judge in seconds whether a figure in the scene is a threat.
A photograph taken at a media preview at the academy on 7 September 2026 shows the range as a walk-in enclosure with scenario imagery projected across three adjoining wall surfaces, fed by a ceiling-mounted projector rig: an immersive projection room rather than a single flat screen, and used without a head-mounted display. A trainee stands at a low platform holding a replica pistol while figures move through a projected building interior. Whether that scenario is rendered in real time or played back as recorded footage is not stated in any source consulted.
Where it fits at the academy
The academy already uses sensor- and laser-based marksmanship tools: an on-weapon motion sensor that reports grip stability, trigger pull and follow-through, a laser-cartridge training platform for gamified weapon-handling drills, and an instrumented live-firing range that scores shots as they are fired. The virtual range extends that toolkit from marksmanship mechanics to use-of-force judgement.
Status
This record covers an announcement. 8 September 2026 is the date the plans were made public, and 7 September 2026 the date the range was shown to media. No source consulted gives a completion date, an in-service date, or confirms that officer training has begun on the range, so no deployment start date is recorded and the adoption stage is Announced.
Deliberately not part of this record
The same announcement covered separate initiatives that are distinct deployments: an enhanced training village with virtual- and augmented-reality capabilities for repeating critical drills; an incident management simulation system that lets officers from different Home Team departments train together in complex scenarios; AI tooling for content creation, automated assessment and personalised learning; and a revamped Home Team Gallery, a public visitor attraction with seven zones, AI avatars of serving and retired officers and multimedia game stations, which opens to the public on 1 December 2026. That gallery opening date is not this project's start date.
Not disclosed
No projector, display, simulator or software vendor has been named, and no product name, station or lane count, or technology partner. Singapore's Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) develops simulation capability for the Home Team but is not named in connection with this facility and is not recorded as a partner here.
