Training military personnel to keep up with new technology has always been a challenging and expensive process and is long due for a change, say experts. By 2022, as much as $11 billion will go to virtual, augmented and mixed reality training systems, with virtual reality becoming a primary focus of military innovation.
While projections vary in this new industry, the virtual reality market is rapidly expanding worldwide. Overall the global VR market is expected to reach $75 billion by 2021, with China‘s demand potentially surpassing 85 million units by 2021 and passing America’s 68 million units forecast. With the consumer sector driving innovation and spending on the market, in countries such as the U.K., South Korea and Australia, platforms have also been developed for incorporating VR strategies in the government sector, such as the military.
According to a brief sponsored by Samsung and put together by FedScoop, a media platform covering the federal government market, the U.S. Department of Defense has relied so far on live training sessions, simulating true-to-life battle scenarios, computers simulators or interaction with avatars in a so-called “synthetic environment.” For “synthetic” digital training alone, the U.S. spends around $14 billion a year, the brief shows. But as technology is making progress and mobile technology improves, so are the training methods for the troops.
Thanks to courses and simulators that can now work on mobile devices with only VR gear attached, soldiers can now be trained anywhere in the world through cloud-shared content. They can simulate using new weapons, engage in new military strategies, even practice high-risk jumps from military planes. Additionally, veterans can immerse themselves in therapeutic environments to help them cope with their post-war anxiety.
“The U.S. Department of Defense is leading the charts relative to immersive (technologies)”, says Chris Balcik, vice president of federal government sales for Samsung, the electronics company that also produces technology for military use. “There is a lot of capability that we have just started to scratch the surface on where the needs can really go so that the use of virtual, augmented, mixed realities be a complement to that large footprint of that live, virtual, constructed space [currently used in military training].”
A Global Technology Arms Race With Challenges
According to a 2017 report on artificial intelligence (AI) in the military, this is the time when the U.S. needs to push forward and innovate if it wants to keep up with the technological advancements by all other rival economies, such as China and Russia.
“The U.S. military can either lead the coming revolution, or fall victim to it,” reads the report from Govini, a data science and analytics firm based in Virginia.
Whether the U.S. would succeed at becoming a leader in new military technology will be determined by how fast the U.S. Department of Defense recognizes the potential of AI and advanced autonomous systems, invest in associated technologies such as advanced computing, artificial neural networks, computer vision, natural language processing, big data, machine learning, and unmanned systems and robotics, as well as find use cases for them in the battlefield, the report shows. According to data from the International Data Corporation (IDC), a global market intelligence firm based in Massachusetts, the United States is still the largest market for cognitive/AI spending, reaching almost $10 billion in revenue in 2017. China, on the other hand, is constantly looking at investing and benefiting from American innovation in the military, putting money in U.S. startups when Washington seems reluctant.
Yet while America has done an overall good job at incorporating artificial intelligence in their defense strategy, the Department of Defense is still not leading the virtual reality sector, experts say.
“For virtual reality, the consumer based sector is the driver,” says Young Bang, senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, a management and information technology consulting firm in Virginia, with VR spending forecast at $6.4 billion in 2018, according to IDC data. By comparison, the Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan is looking at $5.1 billion in spending, while Europe, the Middle East and Africa are at $3 billion combined.
Yet while virtual reality in the government struggles to keep up with the private sector, experts say there are still a few challenges to tackle before the military will get to train in VR at a larger scale. One such obstacle is making sure the VR devices are secure enough to keep military training content protected at all times. The process of securing these devices poses problems in itself, as government and technology providers struggle to agree on how much security is enough for VR sets to be used by military personnel. This, in turn, delays the actual implementation of VR in military training.
“We’ve got to get to a point where we are embracing how much security is necessary to actually allow these things to really happen, otherwise we’re just going to stifle everything,” Balcik says. “You’re using your voice for authentication; if you already plugged your PIN in and you used your biometrics, you’ve got three-four [authentication] factors. Is that enough?”
Another challenge is overcoming limitations of the technology itself that are currently known for causing cyber sickness, a type of motion sickness that gives users nausea.
“Because of the frame rate , the experience is not yet quite optimized,” Bang says. “And battery life for certain untethered devices becomes a constrain, but that will be overcome soon.” As for the frame rate, this too will be improved with the advent of new graphics processors, Bang says. In terms of sharing content, 5G will cause a revolution, experts say, making data transfer easier and faster worldwide.
Producing content available is also a problem. While the basic types of content involving easy tasks such as learning how to wear the military suit are already available, the more sophisticated ones that simulate missions require VR content that is much harder to produce.
“And everyone is playing into it: academia, the end users themselves, the military departments,” Balcik says. “It’s a consortium of assets and resources working together to drive content and populating it in a meaningful way.”
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The U.S. Military Wants to Lead the Innovation Game in VR originally appeared on usnews.com
