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..."

Comments

Marketing...

[PRickard]

The US Army announced today that it will begin training new recruits with modern techniques designed for today's younger and less educated soldier. The new methods include training on the PlayStation 2, Microsoft XBox, Nintendo Game Cube, an enhanced multimedia experience involving cheap pornographic movies and a 38-foot-wide screen, and free liquor Fridays. The Army is reportedly adopting these new training techniques to attract youth who would not otherwise be interested in military service.

'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.)

Silly Army....

[FuegoFuerte]

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?

flight sims

[Eil]

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...

Smells

[Waffle Iron]

'...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.