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Real Warriors Trained In Virtual Worlds
The Washington Post has a piece looking at the U.S. military's increased reliance on gaming for training the next generation of soldiers. From the article: "'The technology in games has facilitated a revolution in the art of warfare,' says David Bartlett, the former chief of operations at the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, a high-level office within the Defense Department and the focal point for computer-generated training at the Pentagon. 'When the time came for [a solider in training] to fire his weapon, he was ready to do that. And capable of doing that. His experience leading up to that time, through on-the-ground training and playing 'Halo' and whatever else, enabled him to execute. His situation awareness was up. He knew what he had to do. He had done it before -- or something like it up to that point.'"
When I did small arms training, one of the hardest things to do (for the Corps at least) was to get people to pull the trigger at the moment of truth. There is a built in hesitation that people have to shooting others. So, training typically starts off with standard targets and then progresses to targets of humans in silhouette, then for close quarters battle training, targets become more realistic looking.
Using CG generated images helps significantly by enhancing the realism and lowering the threshold of resistance to "trigger pull".
What computers cannot teach however, is the NOISE and physical presence of a firefight.
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