The Naval Undersea Warfare Center has long had a problem with deploying new submarine equipment: It’s expensive to train and test.  Building physical models and submarines, flying in all the necessary people, and then housing them for the days/week/months of training is an immense expense.  Now, the NUWC is looking at doing the same thing with  Virtual Worlds and finding that not only does it work well, it opens a whole new world of collaboration and experimentation they didn’t have before.

Overall the NUWC is investigating five categories of applications for virtual worlds: training and education, rapid prototyping, general collaboration and conferencing, public outreach, and data visualization.

The last, says Aguiar, may be one of the most attractive in coming years. There are many high fidelity models aimed at doing very specific things already in use by the NUWC. The virtual world gives the Navy a collaborative interface for those models, not replicating them, just visualizing them in the world. For example, a simulation exercise could track a real unmanned vehicle in the water, but the virtual world provides a way to track the real-time data generated by the vehicle.

via Virtual Worlds News: Naval Undersea Warfare Center: Training, Innovating, and Saving In Virtual Worlds.