Virtual Environments III: Virtual Warfare
Virtual Reality (VR) has been around longer than has its name. Fundamentally, VR is a way for humans to visualize, manipulate, and interact with computers. It originated with flight simulators, and it should come as no surprise that the military is still one of the primary research organizations extending the boundaries of VR.Much of military activity is coordinated by the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO). The DMSO was established to serve as the executive secretariat for the Executive Council for Modeling and Simulation (EXCIMS) and to provide a full-time focal point for information concerning DoD modeling and simulation activities.
U.S. Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), "The Recognized Leader in Simulation, Training, Testing and Instrumentation Systems and Technology," is doing research in the area of "immersive environments"--virtual settings in which the user is completely immersed in computer-generated sights and sounds. STRICOM's badge bears the motto, "All but war is simulation."
The Army's pages proudly announce, "Simulation, using large-scale virtual environments, provides a cost-effective means of developing and fielding state-of-the-art weapon systems, 21st Century tactics, and combat ready warfighters."
The STRICOM mission statement says:
STRICOM is a subordinate command of the US Army Materiel Command. STRICOM's Mission is to provide training and test simulation, simulator, target and instrumentation products and services to develop and sustain war-fighting skills, create a synthetic environment to evaluate concepts and support requirements definition, and support materiel development and test and evaluation. The mission includes serving as the Department of Defense (DoD) Technical Manager for Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) and providing acquisition management and direction for the research, development, acquisition, and fielding of Army Training Devices, Simulations and Simulators (TDSS), and major Test Instrumentation, Targets and Threat Simulators (ITTS).
Virtual simulation focuses largely on manned simulators interacting within a synthetic environment, in many cases, with other simulators. The best known examples are the SIMNET simulators used throughout the Army for both training and development work. SIMNET, the ARPA/Army-developed Simulating Networking System, was designed as an advanced, low-cost training environment capable of connecting many manned combat vehicle simulators. It can conduct large-scale, force-on-force combat operations in a combined arms battle.
The Armed Forces are finding this method of training to be effective--as was aptly demonstrated by the Persian Gulf War. Simulated tank warfare was used quite extensively in training for that conflict, and tank commanders remarked that the real experience seemed a lot like the training exercise. Even on television our gunner's eye view of combat seemed eerily like computer games.
Another important research center is the Army's Virtual Environment Testbed, created at the University of Central Florida as a platform from which to conduct human-factors psychology experiments to evaluate the potential of Virtual Environment technology for use in training. Simulations created there have been used to measure human cognitive abilities in computer-generated environments ranging from basic components of vision, such as perception of lines and colors, to higher, more complex skills, such as navigation through a labyrinthine office building.
The following are a few frames of a virtual building created for this purpose.
The most sophisticated VR systems allow for groups of individuals from remote locations to meet in a computer-generated environment and work or play together. At The Naval Postgraduate School, much work is being developed on the networking of large-scale virtual environments, such as those involving more than 1,000 players. As the photo illustrates, a soldier might be outfitted with goggles and placed on a stationary unicycle in a virtual battlefield.
His training is intended to help him develop the necessary skills of hand-eye coordination and battlefield navigation that once required expensive and dangerous outdoor maneuvers.
The NPSNET Research Group is a group of faculty, staff, and students at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Ca., that works in all areas of networked virtual environments. The group is currently focusing on the following virtual environment (VE) research topics: the large-scale networking of VEs, VE network applications protocols, rapidly reconfigurable VE network protocols, Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) and High-Level Architecture (HLA) protocols, real-time walkthroughs of large-scale networked VEs, world modeling for managing large-scale networked VEs, geometric modeling (terrain, buildings, and other object modeling), the instrumentation of the human body and its representation in the networked VE, and hypermedia integration (how we place video, audio, imagery, and textual data in the networked VE).
More familiar to us, but not touted as "virtual reality" until fairly recently, are the video arcade games that represent examples of the "window on a world" type of system. These are VR applications that users can experience at their own desktop without the use of a Head-Mounted Display or Dataglove or any other additional interface hardware. Racing games and multiplayer computer games like DOOM and Marathon are the point of departure for a great deal of current commercial VR development. They were derived quite naturally from flight simulators and 2-D interaction games like Pong and PacMan.
It appears as if the military is in the business of creating very sophisticated and expensive network multiplayer games like DOOM and Marathon. Military VEs have a great deal in common with these products. Just the other day I saw a story on television showing how the military was using DOOM as the basis of a training program. At one time games imitated warfare; now perhaps warfare imitates games.
