REDEFINING REALITY
MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR
The popular Microsoft Flight Simulator video game series includes a “digital twin” of the planet, combin- ing maps and satellite imagery to render buildings and even trees with real-time weather and air traffic. This is a huge model that is impractical for the constrained bandwidth at the tactical edge, but this model and others like it can allow for hyper-realistic modeling and simulation of vehicles and weapons effects at higher, cloud-connected echelons, or on home station resources. Rendering new objects is facilitated by world-building packages such as NVIDIA’s Omniverse, which include materials, textures and movement as building blocks for construction and simulations. Even lower-resolution versions of these world-based models can be used for rehearsal-of-concept drills or mission walkthroughs, regardless of whether a unit is co-located.
a user logs into a new system. Moreover, some games are enabling a subset of users to play wearing virtual reality devices from a godlike top-down perspective, whereas other players embody avatars and view the world in first person from the ground. Gaming concepts like this seem to fit neatly into the employ- ment of this capability at various echelons, where different types of data and interaction are necessary.
From the tactical perspective, the Army must build systems that have a common look and feel, regardless of how the system is worn or interacted with. A Soldier should be able to utilize their head-mounted display, their handheld system and their desktop system with the same profile and easily switch between them utilizing the same persona.
HARDWARE Systems like the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK), a hand- held tablet or phone housed in a rugged case, offer warfighters a digital perspective of their operating environment. ATAK can visualize maps, both 2D and 3D, as well as a host of graphic control measures to represent the position of friendly and enemy forces. While not as ubiquitous as the consumer smartphones in the civilian world, these devices represent one of the first attempts at converging the physical and digital domains into a piece of handheld kit.
However, the current hardware in augmented reality systems limits the quality of field of view of holographic content. Virtual- reality head-mounted displays provide high-quality visuals, but at the cost of occluding almost entirely the user’s view of the natural world. While the Army is beginning to assess virtual reality for use in less lethal environments such as command posts, ultimately the future of immersive hardware will fuse into a single head- mounted display that can dynamically adjust between rendering content on top of reality or replacing everything with synthetic content. Tis will be necessary to fully realize the metaverse across the battlefield environments of the future.
PICTURE THIS
The immersive hardware in use today almost completely obscures the user’s view of the real world; ultimately, displays will need to dynamically adjust between rendering content on top of reality or replacing everything with synthetic content. (Image by Mission Command Battle Laboratory)
CONCLUSION Despite the push toward the future, we must also acknowledge the limitations we still face with current technology—for exam- ple, access issues, latency and hot mics. Tese problems won’t be solved simply by upgrading to the metaverse and must be solved along with its development. Moving to a metaverse model for planning, preparing, executing and assessing operations would allow dispersed staffs to synchronize warfighting functions more effectively within a virtual node capable of collaboration that would rival existing physical command posts. Ad hoc meetings
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Army AL&T Magazine
Spring 2022
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