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U.S. Army Developing Prototype Holodeck
Our friend, Anonymous Coward, wrote in to tell us that the U.S. Army is developing what it calls the 'Cave Automatic Virtual Environment'. The facilities use 3d video and various forms of projection technology to create a virtual, interactive environment. Note the recursive acronym. (The story's in the February issue of Popular Science.)
I can assure you that the average soldier understands that war is not a video game, that real people, including soldiers, get killed and wounded. That's more than I can say for some civilians.
Realistic training is vital for combat effectiveness and survival. If you have to think about it, you will be in big trouble when dealing with the high stress of combat. The advantages of virtual reality simulations are cost and safety. Field exercises with live ammunition are very expensive and safety requirements are at odds with realism.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
There are several in existence already, and they've been there for 5+ years.
NCSA.uiuc has one..
When I was at the University of Illinois I took people on a tour of the CAVE at the NCSA. It's pretty cool. Four 7 foot projecttion screens on each side of you. You stand in the middle holding a joystick that is tracked by a sensor on the ceiling. LCD goggles that flip opaceity between your eyes gives you a 3D enviroment.
They the cab to a Catapiller bulldozer that they were looking into using as some sort of computer aided training.
It's alot like a first person shooter, only with out guns or textures. Personally I don't think VR will ever become something revolutionary until we develop a more immersive enviorment (real touch (not just that lame vibration stuff) and the solving the dismounted soldier problem for example).
The Cave is the big room style VR thing, linking two together may be new, but I doubt it. Whats cool is that the military are using that kind of thing for simulation :)
You can't win a fight.
I see someone's not up on their history.
Let's see. We have the Mongolians who, in the process of spreading their might, wiped out millions, one at a time, using nothing more sophisticated than an axe. They were deadly enough that the name Khan just rang all sorts of bells with that Star Trek movie...
Then we have the Romans, whose spread of civilization was done at the cost of all of those insignificant, worthless "gauls" who weren't considered important enough by the Romans to do much more with than slaughter and enslave.
Of course we have the crusades, the various civil wars, holy causes, and of course the Inquisition. All fought with low tech. All fought more or less hand to hand. And many weapons were designed to kill someone only at very close range--such as a double-handed long sword, whose primary purpose was to dismember a knight in shiny armor in much the same way you pull apart a cooked lobster.
People have been killing people in very large numbers at very close range for thousands of years. It wasn't like the invention of a programmable missle controller chip (the predecessor to the Intel 4004) caused people to suddenly realize "hey, I don't have to take moral responsibility for who I kill, so let's fight even bloodier and bigger wars than ever before."
Nah; technology found its way to the private sector where it was used, ah, um, for stuff like this web site.
Political science theory going over your head? Here's a brief primer.
In the United States, we've studied these sorts of things to death. Things like the appropriateness and inappropriateness of war. And what most of the better thinkers in the US have come up with is that you only fight a war when another country (a) starts it, (b) that this war will affect citizens abroad in a negative way, (c) you can go in and stop it, and (d) the cost of stopping the war (by engaging the other side) is less than the cost of allowing the beligerant party to continue.
So in the United States, as we are the defacto policeman of the world (and have been to one degree or another since the Monroe Doctrine), we've been trying to figure out how to reduce the cost of war (in terms of casulties on both our side and theirs) in an attempt to promote a degree of "piece" at least for US citizens traveling abroad.
It sucks.
But until you can figure out a pieceful way to solve things like the Balkanization of Yugoslavia (yes, I appreciate the irony) and the murder and/or displacement of millions of innocent civilians in places like Chechnia, Kosovo, or Cambodia in a way which doesn't require some form of force, unfortunately you are going to have two choices.
1) Use force. And that means having very well armed people who are very well trained at killing people, or
2) Allow madmen like the Khamer Rouge run wild, murdering whoever they like.
The world sucks. But having the biggest and baddest army in the world maximizes the chance that when I go to sleep tonight, death squads won't break into my house and murder my wife as she sleeps next to me.
While, your philosophical/moral standpoint is great and I *REALLY* wish it worked that way in real life, but it doesn't. The problem with taking the attitude of, "oh, lets try and work this out, and not fight" doesn't really work in the real world. In the real world you have people like Hitler, who didn't care less about countries such as France when he just basically rolled over them with the Panza divisions. If Britain weren't able to hold out as long as they did, Europe would have fell to Germany in no time. Actually if France would have started building up their military when Germany was, they probably would have been able to hold out longer and do a better job.
The point I'm trying to make is, when you have a good army, and able to possibly stomp out the other guy, and willing to take the risk of going to war to protect your country and your freedoms from nasty people, then the philosophical/moral thing is useless. What good does it do you to have philosophical ideals when you got some dictator telling you which hand to wipe your ass with?
This is also why it's good to have things such as the CAVE so that we have better trained soldiers able to kill better and quicker. I tell you this, I quite happily enjoy the little freedoms I have left, and I'd like to keep them, thank you very much!
http://www2.sara.nl/hec/vr/cave/.
I went there a couple of years ago and was suitably impressed. They use several high-end SGI to control the 3D display on several walls (please don't say we could do this with PC's nowadays. You can't). You need to put SGI's 3D glasses (crystal eyes) and use a "magic wand" (a 3D mouse). Several people can enter in the CAVE and view and control 3D animations. One of the most impressive is the one about galaxies merging. You feel you are there, so to speak. Unfortunately, more software is need for these CAVEs.
Maybe like in start trek, we could use these things for games. VR quake anyone?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Amen to that! Either people are getting locked in there with the safety protocols turned off, or people are getting addicted to the alternate realities that you can create in there.
Although I do not have an addictive personality (unless you count my recent addiction to /.) I could see myself possibly getting addicted to a holodeck type of technology.
Hell, who wouldn't want to go live in their favorite TV show brought to life?
Let's just hope they never create a Commander Data, he was always malfunctioning too. :-)
Ignore Alien Orders
I originally saw this in an SGI magazine about 5 years ago ... the Cave was a cubic room with projections on all sides and one of the environments was a world where you created life (plants, butterflies, music) through your movements.
;)
Here are a couple of links to the Cave @ SGI: http://www.cio.com/archive/050197_et_content.html
http://www.sgi.com.au/news/cave.html
Very cool, the contact for the second one is in Sydney
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I think this is all part of the "virtualizing" of war. Think back to the Gulf War, with all those videos from the video-guided bombs as they home in on the target. It doesn't feel like they're actually killing people, does it?
I'm willing to bet that people who've been trained in machines like this one don't see it as training for killing - it's all just a big video game, right? Doesn't hurt anyone, right?
How long will it take before they start representing "targets" as icons rather than real video? "I just wiped out three of those blinking blue squares - what do you suppose they were?"
Yeah, let's fight a war where one side never has to see any blood, and all the bleeding's done by the other side. Go, U.S. Army! You guys must be real proud of your achievements.