For years, different military programs have worked to combine, “models, simulations, people and real equipment into a common representation of the world.” The US Army has established the STE Cross-Functional Team to develop a “common synthetic environment” for simulations and training.
Pete Morrison, CCO at BISim, believes this military innovation is a microcosm for what could become of the metaverse. “A military metaverse will focus on training, experimentation, and mission rehearsal. The fundamental difference to other commercial metaverses will be that it aims to deliver a high-fidelity digital twin of the real world,” he says.
BISim, or Bohemia Interactive Simulations, has been focused on the ‘under the hood’ of developing the military metaverse, helping different technologies on separate terrain data interact more seamlessly. The company is involved with both the US Army STE and UK MOD SSE, converting its military simulations to run on new scalability architectures. It also provides its flagship products, VBS4 and VBS Blue IG, for trainee interaction within the military metaverses.
Further, BISim’s Mantle Enterprise Terrain Management platform allows developers to import, manage, combine, procedurally enhance and stream high fidelity, geo-specific terrain into military or enterprise metaverses. This new terrain technology is already commercially available and will address some of the roadblocks to the military metaverse by helping move procedural generation onto the cloud.
We caught up with Morrison about how traditionally the military has been using the modelling and simulations as a representation of real life, what is military metaverse and how different it is from a commercial metaverse.
The military uses many different types of simulations, covering land, sea, air and space. Flight simulators, tank simulators, forward air control simulators and many others have been built over the years to provide training in a safe and repeatable manner. It has been possible to integrate these simulators for combined arms training for decades. For example, we may connect a flight simulator with a forward air control simulator so that the ground and air operators can practice working together. While these types of integrations have become commonplace, they have major limitations. For example, it is difficult to represent a dense urban environment in a simulation. Representing more than a few thousand people and vehicle entities is expensive and time-consuming. Additionally, each simulation uses its own format for terrain data, making it challenging to build perfectly correlated terrain. While an integrated federation can certainly work, the military metaverse will deliver greater scale with greater efficiency. This is why the U.S. Army is investing so heavily in programs like STE.