Looks like the U.S. Army is buying into Virtual Worlds in a big way, with a request for information regarding a new virtual world to be used for Training.
The world is meant to be similar to a massively multiplayer online gaming environment like Second Life, supporting thousands of avatars and connections at once. The avatars will be equipped with artificial intelligence and will move and interact in a terrain similar to Earth, according to the ROI. It should allow for the administration of various training scenarios that users can react to in real time.
The world should simulate weather as it happens on Earth and allow people playing to have multiple views of their actions in it, including one that allows them to look at the terrain as they would through the scope of a weapon.
You can read the actual Request for Information at this site, but this is particularly interesting:
A 50 x 50 km terrain footprint with non-kinetic and kinetic operations within a complex and highly dynamic environment and complex data layering and data processing capabilities including: data collection, data analysis, robust data transmission and storage. The terrain should be generated by the ingestion of existing Department of Defense owned terrain databases such as Digital Terrain Elevation Data and will be rendered under various levels of detail based on realistic participant field of view and view distance.
50km square is larger than Second Life by a hefty 33%, and added to the required AI & crowd control simulations they want, would have to be powered by some pretty hefty supercomputing power.
Read the raw RFP via Google Docs.
via Army To Develop Virtual World For Training — Military Training — InformationWeek.
