The US military embraces the metaverse for training exercises

The metaverse appears to very much be on the minds of some high-ranking officials inside the Pentagon. According to a new report from Wired, the U.S. military has been investing in emergent technologies blending the virtual and physical worlds in an effort to optimize its training methods. Red 6 — a company that’s “revolutionizing augmented reality (AR) for military training applications,” according to its website — is reportedly developing “a mix of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and video game graphics.”

This will theoretically enable US “fighter pilots to practice dogfighting against virtual opponents, including Chinese and Russian warplanes, while pulling several Gs,” per WIRED. Red 6 founder and CEO Daniel Robinson told WIRED that his company is constructing “a military metaverse… like a multiplayer video game in the sky.”

Simulating combat in virtual worlds for military training purposes is nothing new. In the 1980’s, the U.S. Army partnered with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to launch SIMNET (an abbreviation of “simulated networking”), a program aimed at building “a large-scale network of interactive combat simulators,” according to the Defense

Technical Information Center. Video games have also long been leveraged for recruitment purposes: in 2002, a first-person shooter video game called “America’s Army” was released “in support of U.S. Army recruiting,” according to the game’s website. (The video game was shut down earlier this month.)

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