DSET 2026 is running at its new home, Cheltenham Racecourse, in the kind of sweltering heat the grandstands do nothing to soften. It has outgrown Bristol, and this is the biggest edition yet. The thing that struck me before any of the technology was who is in the room. The female presence this year is high, with women well represented among the attendees and speakers. DSET has a strong track record on this, and at a defence show it is worth saying out loud.
On the first day, Juny from AVS handed me a drone. Ten inches across, Russian, picked up off the ground in Ukraine. The antenna is gone and a few parts are missing, but it is otherwise complete, thermal camera included. It is 3D-printed, mass-produced, stamped with a serial number and a 2025 date, and it costs about 55 dollars. Juny served with Ukrainian Special Forces and pulled this one off the battlefield himself, and he tells me it is the most common drone Russian forces are flying right now. Fifty-five dollars, built to hunt soldiers at scale. Holding it teaches you more in ten seconds than any slide.
I served before I came into this industry, so I read a thing like that through a soldier's eyes first and a salesperson's second. The gap between how cheap that drone is to make and how hard it is to defend against is not something you can drill your way out of on a live range alone. There are not enough ranges or instructor hours to get a whole force competent at the speed this threat is moving, and you cannot safely fly swarms of live FPV drones at the people you are trying to train. That is the case for simulation in a single object, and it is why counter-drone training is the centre of gravity for us at this show.
We are running two things side by side. A Dogfight Boss F-16 setup for the air-combat crowd, and Horizon Guardian from AVS, the counter-UAS trainer built on the Varjo XR-4 Secure Edition.
Bringing down a ten-inch FPV drone is, before anything else, a problem of seeing it, and that is where Varjo earns its keep. You need enough resolution to pick the thing out against background clutter at distance, and the eye-tracking and performance data to tell whether they genuinely acquired the target and how long it took them to do so. Then you run the scenario again and again, in the gear they will actually wear, for next to nothing per repetition. AVS have their own stand too, showing a more mature build of the same setup, and it is good to see how far it has come in just a year.
Outside, By Light are running live anti-drone demonstrations, along with D3A Defence who also use our headsets, which the new Cheltenham venue finally makes possible. Over at the ADAMS stand there is a full Eurofighter Typhoon cockpit pulling a crowd.
None of this is future tense here. The RAF has brought mixed reality into fast jet training at RAF Valley, upgrading the devices student pilots use on the Hawk T2 and Texan, and expects it to save up to £4 million a year while sending more combat-ready pilots to the front line. When the national air force is banking results like that, the question of whether synthetic training works is settled. What is left is doing it well, and at scale.
DSET is still live as I write this, so I will keep the conclusions short. The threat is cheap and already here, and it is moving faster than training has historically been able to follow. Closing that gap is the whole job, and it is the one thing in this hall that XR is genuinely built to do at scale. If you are at Cheltenham, come and find me on the stand. I would rather hear what you are seeing than tell you what I think.
-Nick
LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW THE RAF IS USING MIXED REALITY IN THIS CASE STUDY