for National Geographic News
The U.S. Army has recruited a surprising ally—the online gaming industry. A multiplayer virtual training tool currently in development may soon train hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers simultaneously for their ever evolving roles around the globe.
The Army has joined forces with There, an online community and computer gaming company, to create an online military training tool that uses existing gaming technologies.
While the project is still in the research and development stage, the online environment is potentially enormous. Given enough time and resources, experts say the "massively multiplayer" system could play out in a real-time, scale model of an entire virtual Earth.
Currently, the project re-creates only a limited local environment, but it does so in real-world scale.
"If you are playing something like EverQuest, for example, the scale of that virtual world is such that it feels like walking one mile [1.6 kilometers] takes about two minutes," said Robert Gehorsam, vice president of strategic initiatives for There. EverQuest is an online fantasy role-playing game not unlike the low-tech Dungeons & Dragons so popular in the 1980s.
"In this world, if you walk a mile it happens in real time," Gehorsam said. "That doesn't mean that every tree and rock is there, but we'll build out the concept as we need different areas."
Virtual training, in which soldiers are immersed in a simulated computer environment, has proven useful. Soldiers inside a mock tank, for example, can look out simulated portholes at a computer-generated landscape populated with friendly and enemy troops.
An Evolving, Portable World
The current interface of the virtual training tool developed by There looks familiar to gamers. It uses a keyboard, mouse, and microphone for audio. That's a positive for many of the soldiers who may end up training in the simulated world.
"The kids in the Army today have been playing computer and video games all their lives," said James Grosse, principal investigator with the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command's Simulation and Training Technology Center in Orlando, Florida.
"They are moving up to leadership positions in the Army, and this stuff is second nature to them," Grosse said. "So how can we leverage that draw, leverage all of the time they've put in, and get some training for our soldiers at the same time?"
The virtual trainer runs on a standard home computer and Internet connection. Developers say this wide platform and portable capacity is a key to the continuing evolution of the program's training effectiveness.
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