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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 ====
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.
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.
Instilling discipline, basic tactics, and getting recruits to understand just how much punishment their bodies can take.
SEAL, Munitions, Howitzer, Tank and Sharpshooter training is for...?
Small unit tactics, basic skills.
This dude deserves a "DUH!" award, if there was one.
What "this dude" is talking about when he refers to rehearsals is mission specific rehearsals. A unit rehearses a mission as much as possible so that people know their jobs and everyone else's and the mission as well as possible. The examples YOU cited are more general tactics and skills training.
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