By Geoff Fein
The Navy has been using virtual worlds to help foster better collaboration and innovation within the undersea fleet.
Those efforts are being incorporated into training of submariners and design of the future fleet, Steve Aguiar, virtual worlds program lead at Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, R.I., told Defense Daily recently.
With the advances being made in Web 2.0, modeling and simulation, computer-aided design, and gaming technologies all coming together in a new capability called virtual worlds, and the rise of Linden Labs’ Second Life, Aguiar was told to go and investigate what this capability might be able to provide across undersea warfare mission areas
“That led to a lot of potential being identified, which then led to some internal investments to actually explore and apply virtual worlds to specific USW (undersea warfare) mission problems and that’s what we have been doing for the last three years,” he said.
Today, it is being used by programs on various aspects of the design of the next generation Virginia-class submarine, Aguiar added.
“That is anything from the design level of how the layout should look, to the analysis of how we expect the fleet to perform in that space, and potentially experimentation where we actually put the fleet into virtual attack centers and measure how well they perform in these future configurations,” he said.
And virtual worlds are also about to be applied in training.
“We partnered with the Submarine Learning Center to start carefully deploying virtual world training components, first into their study halls and then into their classrooms,” Aguiar said. “We are installing a virtual work infrastructure down there that will be able to [support] not only a single training concept but really house all of the virtual components, a virtual submarine learning center.”
The SLC is using Second Life Enterprise (Second Life hosted behind its firewall) as part of a Virtual study hall embedded within the Fire Control Technicians (FT) curriculum, Thomas Wohlgemuth, submarine learning center chief technology officer, submarine training systems technical warrant holder, told Defense Daily.
“The FTs on board a submarine have the task of taking the data, from multiple external sensors, and creating a picture for the officers of the deck, to direct ship’s movement and action. Through the use of the Second Life, the students can immerse themselves into the information (literally) and visualize the entire Target Motion Analysis (TMA) problem: signal generation at the source, signal propagation through the medium, reception at own-ship, system processing, graphical display, and display interpretation,” he said.
Currently, the Submarine Learning Center is deploying a demonstration version for initial assessment, Wohlgemuth said.
“We are in the planning stages of deployment and assessment of a full Virtual SLC campus served out from a single secure virtual world that would be accessible in all SLC classrooms. Initial content will include an improved Immersive TMA Virtual Training Module (VTM) but it will quickly evolve to include other training components such as scenario gaming and SME access,” he added. “There exist three important immediate steps in the adoption of virtual worlds to support our first Immersive TMA Virtual Training Module:
- Integrate stand-alone study hall capability into classroom setting on Tranet-c;
- Work with NUWC to complete the virtual Immersive TMA Module capability by: Expanding scenario sets to N (N= some number) and Improved guidance material via intelligent bots that walk the student through the TMA concepts; and
- Assess the performance and actual benefits of deployed virtual world training capabilities so that further curriculum insertion and future investment can be more effective.
But while the Submarine Learning Center is exploring how virtual worlds could benefit training, the virtual worlds program at NUWC is still facing challenges as they continue to investigate this new technology.
“Some of the challenges we are facing as part of that process are, it’s a very new technology, it’s rapidly evolving, and there are a lot of vendors out there,” Aguiar noted.
“So understanding the maturity, strengths and weaknesses of virtual worlds is kind of a continuous process,” he added. “It’s a running target as we try to match which ones best fit some very specific hard tactical problems.”
For the last 18 months, most of Aguiar’s team’s focus has been on identifying what can be done in virtual worlds that matters to the military. Things that include:
- Collaborative engineering for future command and control designs of submarines;
- Visualization and analysis of command information;
- Concepts of operations experiments;
- Tactical training scenarios;
- Dry runs of platform integration;
- Theater simulation;
- Cognitive modeling; and
- Fleet reach back.
“As we explore what we can do with virtual worlds, the list isn’t getting smaller, it is getting much much bigger,” he said. “And if you think of what the end state of this technology is when you have fleet fidelity, complete access, all of the virtual and real tools inside of one of these environments, it starts to approach [the idea of] ‘there’s nothing you can’t do in a virtual world.'”
NUWC is using multiple vendors, but the focus is not on the individual technology or vendor but the capabilities that virtual worlds generically provide, Aguiar said.
Currently, NUWC is using Second Life, in the public domain, Second Life enterprise which is their software behind the firewall, OpenSimulator which is an open source equivalent of Second Life, and Teleplace
“Those are the four we actively use at this moment,” Aguiar said. “We are investigating at least five other virtual worlds in-house because of some recent new capabilities and changes and we may move our tool set around a little bit.”