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Game Technology Helps Drive Military Training
longacre writes "With the gaming industry now spending more to develop user interfaces than the Pentagon, the Army has begun putting all that R&D to good use in weaponry and training. Reversing the traditional role of games attempting to simulate real life killing machines, it is now the weapons makers using gaming technology to make their products more effective. Popular Mechanics notes, 'Already, [Mark Bigham, director of business development for Raytheon Tactical Intelligence Systems] says that Raytheon has been experimenting with Wii controllers to explore the possibilities for training simulators and other applications that require physical movement. Just think, one day, the R&D that Nintendo put into Wii bowling could end up influencing basic training.'"
This isn't shocking in the least. The Army plays a glorified version of laser tag. Pilots use flight simulator software. Even in the low-budget Marine Corps, I fired on a virtual M16 course.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Just think, one day, the R&D that Nintendo put into Wii bowling could end up influencing basic training.
Are we suppose to be proud or excited by this? Arguably the military is one of the few things left in the US that works well. Get back to me when the government puts a decent size fraction of what they spend on the military into energy research, healthcare, education and career retraining. I'll be thrilled when Wii research ends up in a surgeon's hands than an Air Force cadet.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
Or something... that's what it's called. Essentially a glorified computer game. The first time I got to train on it was during my pre-mobilization training before I deployed to Iraq in 2005. The second time I got to train on it was a few months ago during weekend drill.
You basically have actual M-16's, M-4's, 240-B's, M-249's and 50 cals hooked up to the system. When you fire, the weapon shoots a laser to the screen in front of you. (It's a really big projector screen). You have different scenes (one was an oil-refinery scene of some kind, and the other was an urban setting) where you have to engage the enemy.
The graphics aren't all that great, but it's still pretty fun. I wanted to hook up Halo or GoW to that big-ass screen. That would have been pretty sweet.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
You get what you pay for. In the US, money gets spent on fear.
The Intestate highway system was not sold to Congress as a vital transportation network, but rather as a defense system that could be used to truck around ICBMs to shoot at the ruskies.
The foundations of the Internet were all funded out of DARPA research as ways to communicate during wars, where communication links might be severed and need to be routed around.
Many medical advancements have originated from the efforts to stitch people back together during wars.
If you look at how much money the US spends on being ready to kill, compared to how much it spends being ready to compete, it's no surprise why there's all this technology spilling from the military. They're the only ones being funded because fear results in funding.
If we poured money into education, transportation, information technology, health, etc, we'd see significant paybacks from those investments too. But Americans only think they're getting their money's worth when fear is involved. They haven't quite figured out why Pentagon toilet seats costs $10,000.
I don't think Republicans are entirely to blame, they've just corned the market on fear and have become great at selling it to the "I'll pay you to scare me" American public. Democrats also enjoy the funding that comes with fear, making it a key issue both sides can agree on.
Obama's Apple, McCain's Microsoft: the Politics of Tech
One of the best examples of military grade games and their consumer equivalent is Virtual Battlefield Simulator (VBS) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBS2 and Operation Flashpoint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFP / Armed Assault http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArmA:_Armed_Assault. Both are really great games and are used for military and civilian (police, swat) training.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
http://www.singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2007
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=207
That transcript for the talk doesn't including the question and answer session, so I'll transcribe it here:
The question is, can I talk about the inspiration for the user interface on the combat robot?
Yes, on the combat robot, we started out with engineers designing it, very expensive, joysticks with force reflecting, we put it out in the field, the kids out in the field, the 19 year old started doing *bang* *bang* *bang* pulse width modulation with their hands, umm, we changed it then to a game controller and now the 19 year olds in Iraq pick it up, zero training, know what to do.
Great.
[question about flat worms, etc]
[different question about humans merging with ai, losing emotions, etc]
[question about research funding]
The question is, I used to talk about insect level intelligence, what's my attitude to that.. well, I've got 3 million robots out in people's homes with insect level intelligence. It's a real commercial success. But it doesn't mean we should stick with just that. Some of the principles from that we've been using in these humanoid robots and I was trying to explore a different set of space, but really, I tend to think that, humans are just bit insects. [laughter] Ha ha, we're not as smart as we like to think we are. I still believe that, at its core.
The question, is about [soldiers] becoming emotionally attached to the robots and has that caused us to rethink at all. No, we haven't done that in the military space, but in the home space we've seen people getting attached.. there's a whole set of third party industry making clothes for roombas, there are skins for roombas that you can get, there's some web sites, so I think those, ya know, we'll have Facebook for robots [laughter] I mean, there really is part of this attachment that's an interesting phenomena going on there. Sherry Turpils looked at it with Furbies a lot. There's a lot of projection onto these devices which they don't really deserve from a rational point of view. But we're not rational beings.
The question is, there have been reports of packbots being equipped with machine guns and what do you do worrying about friendly fire. Actually, that's not true, none of the packbots have had a machinegun, the Talon from Foster Miller has had a weapon on it,
all with safety circuit and a human in the loop. I think it is an interesting question, when (if ever) do we want to allow robots to have independent targeting authority. I think now is the time to act. There's a bunch of ethics conferences coming up in the next year. I think its time to put this into the Geneva Conventions - some governments do go along with the Geneva Conventions - and [laughter] I think its time to think about that. Absolutely.
[Audience member asks a follow-up:] You said "some governments" follow the Geneva Conventions, but apparently not that you've done some work for. Is it a good idea for you to be developing AI and robotics for the US government? and, umm, in my mind, that could lead to some of the worst nightmare scenarios and I'm wondering how, ya know, what your thoughts are on mitigating against...
Yeah, I think that, in a sense is nothing to do with AI, that's been a question which has faced scientists in the past since the time of Da vinci, who was completely funded by military, doing military work for his patrons. So that's an issue that scientists have had to deal with for hundreds of years. Independently, of AI. And I think it is a big responsibility of scientists to worry about controls of how things are used and I think, actually, the Geneva Conventions have been a good way of
How we know is more important than what we know.
My stepson, an avid FPS gamer, joined the Army in 1999. They put him in an ultra-realistic tank simulator, and he destroyed everything that moved on the virtual battlefield. When he came out, they were all standing there staring at him...
He asked, "What are you looking at?"
They replied, almost in unison, "A tanker."
He ended up driving a tank to Baghdad with the elite 3rd Squadron of the 7th Cavalry, and fought in the only force-on-force tank battle of the war at Objective Montgomery (out near the airport).
Yes! Mod up!!! You can make any unsubstantiated, unsupported claims IF its about how bad the USA sucks ass!!!
From the post above, it sounds like someone has been drinking the daily kos cool aide by the gallon. First, get things straight. The US military works well, very very very well. So well that the whole world has been leaning on the US for military support and protection for the past 60 years. This includes conflicts right there on European soil (Bosnia, reference Srebrenica), and trying to clean up the mess caused by European colonials in Africa, who just packed up shop and said "oh well, not our problem".
The US military destroyed the Iraqi army in less than a week. This is a fact. The botched occupation was not a military plan, but a civilian leadership fiasco. The Bush administration had some twisted day dream that the rest of the world would donate troops and supply to bring democracy to Iraq, and the Bush administration was dead wrong, hence the catastrophe in Iraq. Its not a lack of military power, but a lack of political resolve. I guess you fail to see that, but since I'm talking truths and your playing to anti US sentiment, you'll get modded +5 insightful, and I'll get modded troll/flamebait.
20th century Marxism is not progress...