Irish VR Startup Lands Deal to Create Military Training Metaverse
Irish virtual reality developer VRAI is setting up a digital military training space in the metaverse in a new partnership with BAE Systems. The startup is designing the virtual world for training all kinds of military forces as an immersive experience within a single artificial environment, a use of metaverse technology that has begun to crop up with increasing frequency.
Virtual Military
VRAI’s technology leverage synthetic datasets and machine learning to evaluate human performance. The five-year-old company focuses on hazardous activities in toxic environments or dangerous weather. For instance, one VRAI client is simulating potential problems and solutions in the offshore wind industry.
The military is an obvious space where realistic simulations would be a benefit. The goal for the training metaverse created by BAE and VRAI is to assist militaries operating in air, land, sea, and space, extending even to cyber defense forces. The idea is to set up training for any conceivable circumstances that military forces might encounter without risking people or material in the physical world, especially when they haven’t had the training yet. In some ways, the project extends the existing simulated training, usually limited to roles like pilots, to the entire military structure. The first iteration demonstrating that the project can work will come out by the end of the year.
“We believe that data, particularly data captured via virtual training, has the power to revolutionize how militaries prepare for operations,” VRAI co-founder and managing director for product and customers Niall Campion said. “By capturing, storing and evaluating individual user performance data within simulation we can deliver actionable insights to instructors actionable insights, personalized to each trainee. Our work with BAE Systems will enable us to bring these insights right to the front line of training.”
Military Metaverse
Connecting the military to the metaverse for training is underway globally at different levels already. The U.S. Air Force has taken steps to set up a training area in the metaverse for its human pilots by trademarking Spaceverse as a “secure digital metaverse” where it could potentially prepare pilots, human or otherwise, for future missions. Microsoft’s new metaverse project for training AI to pilot drones takes a different approach to training, focusing on improving autonomous pilots, which likely includes military ventures, rather than setting simulations up for humans. Spanning the real world and the virtual space, the U.S Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working with Xerox to create an augmented reality system with an AI to convert text and video instruction guides into an interactive digital teacher.
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