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US Military Ramps Up Stinky VR Training

Posted by chrisd on from the don't-quit-college-for-video-games dept.

HarrisonSilp writes "CNN.com has a story regarding the U.S. Military's recent foray into using Virtual Reality as a training method. Being developed by Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), they call it Mission Rehearsal Exercise or MRE for short, and it is a most impressive setup. 'The 5-minute scenario is projected onto a 150-degree movie screen, complete with 10.2-channel audio that creates floor-shaking sound effects. To enhance the sense of reality, smells including burned charcoal can be pumped into the room.' It almost makes me want to write off college and join the army..."

2 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. flight sims by Eil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The military has been using virtual reality for years now, just not exactly in this form...

    I'm talking about flight simulators. They perfectly model the inside of a cockpit, hook the thing up to hydraulics and have an entire room full of minicomputers to drive the simulation with SGI Onyx machines for modeling the landscape and entities. The scenery is provided by 8 projectors which display the surroundings on a curved reflective screen just outside cockpit windows.

    These multi-million dollar machines are quite impressive definitely a lot more fun than X-Plane. Machines at separate military bases can even be linked up together for the ultimate multiplayer flight sim.

    Getting to check one of these out has definitely been one of the highlights of my life as a geek. I decided that being a systems programmer / maintainer or developer for flight simulator could be a very entertaining use of my future career. I already have the avionics background, I would just need the CS degree and maybe a class or two at Embry-Riddle...

  2. Smells by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful
    '...To enhance the sense of reality, smells including burned charcoal can be pumped into the room.' It almost makes me want to write off college and join the army...

    That's lame. I experienced the smell of burned charcoal yesterday; it was the savory aroma of my Thanksgiving turkey cooking on the Weber grill. It gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

    If they really want to do combat simulation, they need to pump in the smell of cordite and napalm; the smell of rotting flesh on week-old corpses; the smell of truckfulls of men who haven't changed their clothes in five weeks; the smell of raw sewage and mud at the bottoms of trenches; the smell of mustard gas and burning tires; the smell of fear.

    If they had this kind of realism, you'd stay safely in college.