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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..."
'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 ====
"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.
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
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.
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?