Many innovative technologies come from the military world. This is valid under many aspects that do not strictly concern with war strategies. Over the centuries the military world has developed strategic solutions that have proved to be fundamental for the management of common life. Just think of the architecture and planning of the territory and cities or the study of mechanics. Up to modernity with the development of increasingly sophisticated technologies such as GPS, touchscreens, or the Internet itself, all the result of military investments.
Watchword: open cloud architecture
With the arrival of the metaverse, the intentions of the company are to make users dependent on their technology within a closed and commercialized ecosystem. This would involve a rather narrow vision of the metaverse, reductive of the internal simulation technology. A self-respecting virtual world must remain open and support thousands of simultaneous players, offering valuable and engaging use cases. Realizing this vision requires an open cloud architecture with native support for cloud scalability. And military organizations are moving towards building an effective realization of this kind of metaverse.
A metaverse is even real
The U.S. Army started from the scalable and cloud-supported metaverse, in creating synthetic training environment (STE) under development since 2017. Replace all programs simulation and integrate multiple systems into a single connected system for combined weapons and joint training, are the primary intents of the STE.
The ambition of the STE is to draw on the available data resources automatically to render millions of simulated entities, such as AI-based vehicles or pedestrians.
In the first place, the STE is different from any type of traditional, server-based approach. For example, it will be able to host a 1:1 digital twin of the earth in the cloud capable of streaming high-fidelity images from the ground, all connected to simulations.
New terrain management platforms such as Mantle ETM will ensure that all connected systems operate on exactly the same terrain data. Thus, for example, trainees in a tank simulator will see the same trees, bushes and buildings as the pilot in a connected flight simulator, facilitating combined weapons operations. At the same time, however, the scalability of the Cloud will allow a better representation of the real world, with more details such as the population density and the complexity of the terrain that traditional servers were not able to support.
Not just marketing
STE will be very different from the rest of the metaverse and this will be the key to its success. It was designed for specific purposes such as improving soldier training, simulating missions, and experimenting with new systems for the real world. To do this, it’s necessary an accurate representation of the Earth.
The commercial realities, but also the healthy ones will continue to build fantasy “meta worlds”, with few similarities with the real world.
But when the STE will be used in day-to-day training by 2030, the graphical consistency and resource usability of the cloud-based military open source world will demonstrate that the value of the metaverse is untied from sales and purchase ambitions and can truly improve lives of all.
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