This is Not a Game

The military looks toward immersive gaming tech to train its troops

Raytheon is developing a Soldier-Squad Virtual Trainer for the U.S. Army’s Synthetic Training Environment. It will allow soldiers to train at their home station in a realistic virtual world. Image credit: Raytheon

U.S. militarytrainers have used simulators and virtual reality technology for manyyears. Over the last decade, these technologies have improved significantly.Processing power has increased, graphics cards now render photorealisticenvironments, and latency, or lag, has been reduced.

Today, developmentcontinues. Faster frame rates, cloud computing, artificial intelligenceadvancements and the introduction of 5G wireless technology will all contributeto more realistic, more affordable training.

“Before, you neededbig, bulky simulators, racks of computers and a large physical space like agym, warehouse or hangar,” said Harry Buhl, Raytheon Synthetic TrainingEnvironment lead investigator. “Now, it’s a very small footprint locally – itcould be something you wear, like goggles driven wirelessly by a laptop, andthe processing power could be done in the cloud. You could train pretty muchanywhere in the world.”

Raytheon is incorporating these advancements into a Soldier/Squad Virtual Trainer, part of a pursuit for the U.S. Army’s Synthetic Training Environment. It will allow soldiers to sharpen their skills at home in a realistic virtual world built on a video game engine.

“The ultimate testbefore being deployed in theater is still going to be ‘live’ training,” Buhlsaid. “It’s hard to replicate the sweat, the dirt, the bugs, the smell andfatigue in a virtual environment. You also don’t want to put your soldiersunnecessarily at risk with very dangerous training events like in-flightemergencies or live artillery, so that’s why the blending of synthetic and livetogether, using augmented reality technologies, is the ultimate goal.”

The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Marine Corps currently use a Raytheon-developed virtual trainer for maintaining the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft. The trainer works in 2D on a three-touchscreen computer that mimics the V-22 multi-function display. There is also a virtual reality version with 3D animation that lets maintainers work on the inside and outside of the aircraft. The trainer incorporates the real V-22 mission computer software into the gaming engine.

“The trainees can dosomething as simple as flipping on the avionics power switch to...folding upthe wings so it can fit on the deck of a ship,” said Dean Hoover, RaytheonExtended Reality chief engineer. “That procedure is very complex, and it’sprobably something they’ll only get to do once in real-world training. If youdo just one of the steps wrong, there’s a chance of breaking something. So,they do it over and over and over again, ad nauseam, until they get it right inthe virtual space.”

According to Hoover,this kind of virtual training improves emotional engagement, movementcoordination, retention and understanding.

The Army is usingvirtual reality and augmented reality “to immerse their people into a syntheticenvironment and provide realistic visualizations that will enable toughrealistic training, when and where it’s needed, all to a high degree of costeffectiveness,” Buhl said. “It also trains soldiers with faster and moreaccurate decision skills, because they replay scenarios and see how differentdecisions result in different outcomes.”

Learn more about Raytheon’s STE solutions.