Ready soldier one. The US army is creating a virtual replica of the planet to drill troops in. The idea is that it will be so realistic that practising missions in virtual reality will be听almost as good as the real thing.
The latest development is a tool that can automatically make a听virtual reality environment听of almost anywhere. The user simply draws a rectangle on a map, and then the tool trawls publicly available data sources, such as Open Street Map, to build the terrain.
鈥淲e did the whole Korean peninsula this way, all from public sources,鈥� says Mike Enloe, chief engineer on the project at Fort Leavenworth military base in Kansas. The system also brings in topographical data and satellite photography to make it look听as lifelike as possible. It took just three days to create virtual reality versions of North and South Korea, something that previously would have taken months.
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Enloe鈥檚 team has also built virtual versions of San Francisco and New York, each with millions of buildings, and a virtual Las Vegas that incorporated street view imagery and 3D models directly from Bing Maps. It鈥檚 difficult to get that data from publicly available sources so the Las Vegas work required a special partnership with Microsoft. 鈥淚t really feels like you鈥檙e down there in the strip,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 pretty amazing.鈥�
Virtually Real
Realism is an important part of the simulations, so driving between two points on the virtual Earth takes as long as it would do in real life. An听听about the system, says that the project听will allow soldiers to 鈥渢rain as they will fight, on the terrain they will fight on鈥�. It adds the virtual Earth听is an attempt to keep pace with gaming technology and other simulation software 鈥渨here we currently lag鈥�. The result is a far quicker, cheaper way to generate virtual environments based on real world locations, says Enloe.
Gaming technology itself is an increasingly common part of some military training tool kits, says听, at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, a British think-tank based in London. He says there are British Ministry of Defence sites 鈥渨here there are vast rows of desk spaces with effectively civilian gaming kits 鈥� steering wheels and all the rest of it 鈥� and they are playing refitted civilian games.鈥�
Using gaming technology such, as virtual reality, militaries can train soldiers cheaply and also gather data on each trainee鈥檚 performance for comparison. However, some important aspects of training, like physical endurance, cannot be tested virtually, says Quentin.
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