The military has been using computers to practice battles for decades, but now, the armed forces are exploring the power of virtual worlds, known as Single Synthetic Environments, in which to rehearse wars.
A “digital twin” of real-world 3-D terrain and airspace, this technology is being developed by companies like BAE Systems, which has created a centralised system for military personnel to train.
The environment has “layers” like weather systems added on top, and there are typically missing elements in large-scale military training exercises, such as civilians. However, the Single Synthetic Environment offers a solution to this problem.
The system also exploits massive improvements in the speed and power of cloud-based computing, as well as machine learning and AI software. It has 60,000 AI “entities” and replicates the physics and real-world terrain.
Lucy Walton, head of training at BAE Systems, said: “Historically the simulation and the simulator were together – we’ve separated those two.
It replicates the physics, it replicates the real-world terrain and now we have one that everybody uses in the same central system.”
The concept is the same technology used in massively multi-player online gaming environments and the people behind those games are involved.
Mimi Keshani, co-founder of Hadean, a London-based software firm that has worked with companies like Minecraft to build their virtual worlds, said: “You’ve got a huge amount of complexities to manage, and different levels of fidelity from different people interacting.
So in this system, we’ve got people in Typhoons and assets flying above the ground, we’ve got land forces. All of them need to see different things, but they need to see it in a common operating picture.”
»Single Synthetic Environment: US Military Using Digital Twins to Train for War«
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