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US Military Ramps Up Stinky VR Training
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..."
Simulations have been a large part of Military development for a LONG time; almost since we had computers. I used to go to a school which was next to a longstanding military research post for virtual reality installations. When I left, they where working on a way to make a compact way to distribute the tank simulation data to multiple systems for networking.
Mostly they focus on the visual data in all of the simulations because it helps the most. This is an interesting new thing, but its really only an incremental improvement, considering how advanced the military simulations already are.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
'Army of One' is referring more and more to the average IQ of new recruits, not the sense of fellowship. (This isn't an attack at the military, just an observation about the people I know who have signed up in the last 2 years.)
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
Those idiots can just download a DOOM wad that turns all the monsters into Barney the Purple Dinosaur! They'll be killing machines in no time!
"It can't replace any real training," says Omer. "But what it does do is allow the military to prepare and rehearse before they get into any situation."
And boot camp is for...?
Combat training is for...?
SEAL, Munitions, Howitzer, Tank and Sharpshooter training is for...?
This dude deserves a "DUH!" award, if there was one.
Remember those lines from G.I. Jane:
Nurse: "Why are you doing this?"
Jane: "Do you ask that of all the men?"
N: "Yes"
J: "And what do they answer?"
N: "I get to blow shit up."
Hell, Rogue Spear and Q3 mods provide enough realism...just add it to the VR and several "pressure cuffs" and "shock suits" to simulate damage.
Oh, well, I suppose every little bit helps.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
The annoucement at http://www.isi.edu/uarc.html lists a couple dozen news sites that have covered this announcement.
If you're interested in the AI type stuff behind virtual/synthetic elements that would go along with this sort of thing, check out some SOAR/ASTT documents.
just get the soliders play metal gear solid one and two a couple thoudand times till they think they are snake. then we will have a army of super soliders able to take on 50 feet nuclear armed dinosaur looking things. think the future. think snake.
Me and lunchbox here are going to kick your ass.
Now that the hype from the World Trade Center "lets go kill some terrorists" hype is dying down, the military returns to researching new recruitment techniques. We find our greatest influx comming from gamers, and we intend to demonstrate that the military is the ultimate experience. In other news, the Air Force is assisting in the development of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2005 to include some of the newest aircraft in order to give, "product placement and early training," to future recruits.
While this may be an interesting new technology, or cool new advances on older technology, I have to wonder why we need this so badly. I mean, really... The Army is always getting fancy new toys like this which cost millions of dollars, yet the Marine Corp still manages to do better with the leftovers they inherited from the Army after Vietnam. Can someone explain why we really need to waste "more than $45 million... between 2000 and 2005." on these new toys?
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...
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.
It would be better to give the military guys paintball guns and let them reherse marine tactics on each other
Then give them a REAL virtual reality combat sim, not some fancy looking movie
I'm sorry but i looked at the picture and it looked like virtual cop 2 with a special movie screen
Ok maybe the screen is nice and its a decent similator, but tell me how do a group of soldiers actualy interact with it if its just a screen? At least if you wear a body suit and goggles you interact with it with your body so its actually realistic.
I dont know about this
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Actually, the ICT hired Paul Debevec, one of the most prolific young researchers in using real-world data in graphics. Some of his work involves capturing the reflectance properties of skin and rendering the skin with novel geometry and novel lighting. That's a little better than a Quake skin. ;)
Soldiers continue to live in shitty housing, with hardly any benefits, and get paid like crap while counted on to sacrifice their lives.
Yet another Army idea due for the scrapper after countless $$$ is spent. Remember how much they spent on Land Warrior before they canceled that?
Any type of VR the army has was built by the lowest bidder, made with the least expensive parts and is sure to be 100% crap. When I was in, we had some motion platforms designed to teach you to drive the M1A1 tank. They were too floaty, geometrically incorrect, didn't have enough cool animations for falling off of cliffs and they wouldn't let you run over any trees. (in the simulation, you'd "die". In real life, you go through 3 foot thick trees like buttah) There is no substitution for actual live training. The army will never get VR right, they even screwed up applesauce.
MRE also stands for "meal ready to eat", ie, field rations. Now they want to call this training Mission Rehearsal Exercise...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Unfortunately, the Army is still of the mindset that quantity is better than quality and has repeatedly lowered standards to pump up the numbers. Intelligence/Education is just one of the many victims of this mindset. This, at a time when the tasks of the average soldier are becoming increasingly more complex, both technologically and politically. Soldiers can no longer just be considered automotons that mindlessly follow orders... they have to be aware of the ramifications their actions can have. IE: How does a soldier fix the wireless networks of a group of tanks when his MOS is for radio communications? How does a soldier respond when confronted by the media? I hope the Army learns quickly, but history indicates otherwise.
Humorless sig goes here.
I always thought the worst were the "Five Fingers of Death". That and the "Brick of White Rice".
Humorless sig goes here.
No kidding. I gave my dog an MRE sausage once. He approached it excitedly, then stopped, froze, put his tail between his legs and backed slowly away. No kidding.
And, back then at least, the MRE's were packaged in Cadillac MI, where, I believe, there are a lot of pet food processing plants...
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
"Virtual Reality" simply means artifically making something seem, well, real.
When applied to a combat situation, this can mean making the body smell, see, and hear things that they would encounter in combat, to prepare their senses for the real thing.
"VR" does not mean "Computer-generated imagery & feelings hacked directly into your brainstem", nor does it have to mean "3d generated graphics with stereoscopic vision and a powerglove".
Even though said soldier obviously KNOWS it's not real, the assault on his senses goes a long way to preparing him for the real thing. That's the point.
SLASHDOT:
From the demographics I once saw on the OSDN Website, it looks like the readers of slashdot are the type of people who are well-off, white, and fairly unlikely to ever experience war except through Quake, CNN, or Neal Stevenson Novels. Why are there always military articles posted on Slashdot?
Nerds and geeks will forever be the whimpering lapdogs that build the technology for killing! Racial military minority representation has risen from 14 percent in 1975 to 26 percent. This is faster than the rate that African Americans and Latinos have attained Internet access! Slashdot readers are smart, when will the poseur editors get over their military wanna-be aspirations?
Yes folks, this is the new mode of warfare: spin control.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I have worked on these flight sims for a living, testing them and helping develop them. I've logged around a hundred hours of flight time in A-4J, T-45, AV-8B, and S-3B sims, as well as F-18, F-14, S-3, T-45 and other development or test sims. I can state with absolute certainty that getting paid to play these video games was the coolest part of my job.
Because I have this experience, I'd like to throw in a few considerations to this discussion.
The military pays LOTS of money to get these simulators as close to reality as possible. I know - my job was to verify that they fly just like the airplane. We would spend a week or more flying a sim in every conceivable situation, and comparing the results to real airplane data. But in the end, there were usually several significant areas where the sims just don't stack up. You cannot ever get a sim as good as the airplane, for a number of fundamental reasons, not the least of which is the lack of true G-forces.
In the end, the utility of ANY sim is determined mostly by understanding exactly where it is "mission representative" - where the model is representative of the actual mission the sim must model. Then, you carefully develop a syllabus, or training regime, that sidesteps those areas where the sim is not accurate. In some cases, this means not training certain tasks at all. In other cases, it means not using a sim in certain parts of the operating "envelope" while performing certain tasks.
Why is this important? Because it points out a key fact of simulation, not just flight simulation. Every simulation has its weaknesses. This does NOT mean the simulation is not useful - it simply means that you MUST understand those areas, and account for them while training. It is possible - and in fact done by the military - to take an individual with no actual experience in a certain type of airplane, spend two weeks training them in the simulator, then give them exactly two flights in the REAL airplane, before certifying them to solo in that airplane, and in fact start performing missions (not combat, of course, but that doesn't take long either).
Sims are tremendously useful. You can do things you'd never risk in real life, and do them over and over again until the reaction is automatic. You can do boring stuff, and do it many times. You can do things much faster - because you don't have to march, or drive, or fly to the operating area. And best of all, you can do it cheaply.
Sims are here to stay in the military. The most significant change in military procurement policy we're likely to see, worldwide, is the emphasis on interconnected simulations of all kinds for military-wide war gaming. We'll have better trained troops at all levels, at a lower cost than ever before.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
You're lucky you didn't get them back in the pork patty days. There was almost no attempt then at anything resembling taste.