REDEFINING REALITY
THE COMMON OPERATIONAL PICTURE “I need to understand” is perhaps the primary driver behind technology for mission command. Te fundamental concept of developing and maintaining a common operational picture is to enhance situational awareness, enable situational understanding and promote shared understanding across all echelons. Executed through complex application programming interfaces that link digital systems to display information on 2D and 3D maps or by manually tracking friendly and enemy information on paper maps, the process hasn’t evolved much in the last three decades. Te effort requires large, cumbersome command posts resourced with centralized people and technology that conduct the oper- ations process and ultimately generate a common operational picture that commanders and staffs can use to make the most timely and accurate decisions possible.
Unfortunately, as operations have grown more complex and data more prolific, units have struggled to effectively conduct information and knowledge management. Command posts have expanded in size and scope to meet the need. Increases in the number of personnel and dependence on the network have left today’s command post vulnerable to enemy attack without sufficient mobility and survivability. Te metaverse provides a potential solution that could enable the operations process while inherently making the command post more survivable by distributing operations, as well as reducing the physical and elec- tromagnetic footprints.
NETWORKING Bandwidth is a scarce resource on today's battlefields and will require a technological breakthrough to fully enable the meta- verse. However, many tactical scenarios could benefit from information that is not particularly dense, and therefore requires less bandwidth to transmit, such as geospatial position, summary of unit status, current objective, etc. Furthermore, information that is more dense, such as a high-resolution 3D terrain model of the operational area or video of an unknown enemy vehicle to train aided target-recognition algorithms, does not need to be sent in real time over the network. Tis will require the Army to utilize cloud services that are not only efficient in moving and processing information but are controlled by intelligence that understands the value of information for the clients that are requesting, or are likely to request, data and services.
A critical problem that could mean the difference between life and death is the delay or latency of this information. Te assumed change—or lack thereof—in position of friendly units can cause a waterfall of decisions across the metaverse and change the
98 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2022
WHAT’S A METAVERSE?
Coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash” to describe an online world where users interact in a virtual space, the metaverse already has become familiar through massive multiplayer online games and virtual worlds like Second Life, Roblox or Minecraft. Just as mobile devices changed how the internet was consumed over the last 10 years, a new generation of technology—in this case, virtual and augmented real- ity headsets—are enabling a new perspective on how we consume content. No longer limited by the confines of flat screens, these headsets allow users to perceive and interact with 3D objects and media rendered on top of or in place of the physical world. The concept has gained even more popularity with the pandemic- driven acceleration of remote work. Facebook has even pinned its future on this shift, leveraging its acquisition of virtual reality headset maker Oculus and develop- ment of its own metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds, it changed the name of its parent company to Meta in October 2021.
One of the most thorough explor ations of the meta- verse was written as a nine-part blog series by Matthew Ball, a venture fund partner and respected business writer. Ball’s primer focuses on seven aspects of the metaverse:
• Networking. • Virtual platforms. • Hardware. • Computing power. • Interchange tools and standards. • Payment services. • Content, services and assets.
He discusses the progress in each area, as well as the way to fully enable and adopt the metaverse as a successor to the mobile internet.
Despite the push toward the future, we must also acknowledge the limitations we still face with current technology.
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