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Will Knight

Business
May 17, 2022 7:00 AM


THE US MILITARY IS BUILDING ITS OWN METAVERSE

Defense tech companies have latched on to the metaverse hype—but what they’re
building will be a far cry from Meta’s virtual world.
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Mike Killian Photography/Red 6

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On May 10, two fighter pilots performed a high-altitude proto-metaverse
experiment. A few thousand feet above the desert of California, in a pair of
Berkut 540 jets, they donned custom AR headsets to connect to a system that
overlaid a ghostly, glowing image of a refueling aircraft flying alongside them
in the sky. One of the pilots then performed a refueling maneuver with the
virtual tanker while the other looked on. Welcome to the fledgling military
metaverse.

It isn’t only Silicon Valley that’s gripped by metaverse mania these days. Just
as tech companies and corporations are scrambling to develop strategies for
virtual worlds, many defense startups, contractors, and funders are increasingly
talking up the metaverse, even if its definition and utility aren’t always
clear.

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The key technologies needed for the metaverse—augmented and virtual reality,
headmounted displays, 3D simulations and virtual environments built by
artificial intelligence—are already found in the defense world. The result is a
lot less polished, cutesy, and spacious than Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual world
vision, but that’s partly the point. And there’s a good chance that the
underlying tech could take off, even if it stutters in the civilian realm.


Courtesy of Red 6


A mix of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and video game graphics,
for instance, have enabled fighter pilots to practice dogfighting against
virtual opponents, including Chinese and Russian warplanes, while pulling
several Gs. Red 6, the company that’s developing the technology, says this
delivers a far more realistic test of a pilot’s abilities than a conventional
flight simulator. “We can fly against whatever threat we want,” says Daniel
Robinson, founder and CEO of Red 6. “And that threat could be controlled either
by an individual remotely or by artificial intelligence.”



Red6’s AR technology has to work in more extreme conditions, with lower latency
and higher reliability than consumer AR or VR headsets. Robinson adds that the
company is now working on a platform that will allow many different scenarios to
be represented in augmented or virtual reality. “What we’re building is really a
military metaverse,” he says. “It’s like a multiplayer video game in the sky.”



Metaverse-related ideas are already part of some of the latest military systems.
The high-tech helmet for the new F-35 fighter jet, for instance, includes an
augmented reality display that shows telemetry data and target information on
top of video footage from around the aircraft. In 2018, the US Army announced
that it would pay Microsoft up to $22 billion to develop a version of its
HoloLens augmented reality system for warfighters, known as the Integrated
Visual Augmentation System (IVAS).

Courtesy of Red 6

VR and AR have become routine aspects of military training in recent years. In
2014, the Office of Naval Research and the Institute for Creative Technologies
at the University of Southern California developed Project BlueShark, a system
that allowed sailors to drive vessels and collaborate in a virtual environment.
Another effort, called Project Avenger, is now used to help train US Navy
pilots. The US Air Force is using VR to teach pilots how to manage aircraft and
missions. VR is also used to help treat veterans for chronic pain and
post-traumatic stress. And Boeing has created an AR environment that lets
mechanics practice working on planes before stepping aboard a real one.

Recently, the US military has begun exploring more complex virtual worlds. There
is also growing interest in connecting and combining virtual worlds in a way
that resembles metaverse thinking. In December 2021, the US Air Force held a
high-level conference involving over 250 people in locations stretching from the
US to Japan, via a virtual environment. “The promise is integrating these
technologies,” says Caitlin Dohrman, general manager of the defense division of
Improbable, a company that develops virtual world technologies, has created
sprawling virtual battlefields featuring over 10,000 individually controlled
characters for the UK’s military wargames, and also works with the US Department
of Defense (DOD). “It is an extremely complex type of simulation, especially
given the fidelity that the military demands,” Dohrman says. “You can either
have live players who are participating in the simulation or [characters] can be
AI-enabled, which is often what the military does.”

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Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, a VR company Facebook acquired in 2014,
says Zuckerberg’s decision to go all-in on VR and the metaverse created a
massive amount of expectation in the commercial world. “Everyone on their
quarterly corporate calls, like a week or two later, they’re being asked by
investors, ‘What’s your metaverse play?’,” he says.



In 2017, Luckey cofounded the defense company Anduril. He says that despite all
the recent metaverse hype, there is big defense potential, partly because
military training is so important and costly. But he says the technology does
not have to be hyper-realistic to be useful, and he wants Anduril to focus on
only using the technology where necessary. “Everything we’re doing with VR is
something where it is uniquely better than any other option,” he says. This
includes using VR to train people to operate Anduril’s drones, he says, or to
display information about an area using data from sensors on the ground.

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As with Zuckerberg’s planned metaverse, newer military systems rely heavily on
AI to be effective. In October 2020, the AR technology developed by Red6 was
used to pit a real fighter pilot against an aircraft controlled by an AI
algorithm developed as part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) AI dogfighting project. The AI top gun, created by another startup
called EpiSci, learned how to outmaneuver and outgun an opponent through a
process of trial and error. The AI pilot eventually developed superhuman skills
and was able to beat its human opponent every time.

Another DARPA project, called Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance, aims to create
an AI assistant that watches what a soldier is doing and offers advice through
speech, sound, or graphics. In contrast to the augmented reality system
developed by Boeing, which only works in a specific setting, such a system would
need to make sense of the real world. Bruce Draper, the DARPA program manager
responsible, says the real value of technologies being explored by the military
lies in merging the real and the virtual. “The metaverse is mostly virtual, and
virtual worlds are useful for training, but we live in the physical world,” he
says. “The military domain is inherently physical, it’s not about an abstract
metaverse.”

But efforts to merge the virtual and the real world have encountered problems.
In March 2022, a leaked Microsoft memo reportedly showed that those working on
IVAS, the US Army version of the HoloLens AR headset, expected it to be received
badly by users. And an audit released by the DOD in April 2022 concluded that
the US Army could waste its money as a result. Jason Kuruvilla, a senior
communications manager at Microsoft, shared several statements from high-ranking
army figures proclaiming the potential of the IVAS. He also pointed to a 2021
DOD report that discusses the importance of developing IVAS rapidly, allowing
problems to be ironed out along the way.



Such high-profile and expensive endeavors have only boosted the confidence of
those pushing the military metaverse. “I know that this is the future of
military training,” says Doug Philippone, global defense lead at Palantir, a
defense company that has invested in Anduril. Philippone is also a cofounder of
Snowpoint Ventures, which has invested in Red6. “But I also see it as the future
of the way that the military fights and makes decisions. So it's not just about
fighting, it's about making decisions.”

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Luckey says Anduril is already working on technology that could do this in
training missions and combat. “The next big step for us, which I am really
excited about, is taking from our core product and piping that data to heads-up
displays that troops on the front line are going to be able to wear,” he says.

But how much of this cutting-edge tech makes it to the front line—or even into
training exercises—remains unclear. Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue
University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who has developed virtual battlefield
training platforms for the US military, says the tech deployed will often be
considerably simpler than metaverse boosters imagine. He suggests that a simpler
version of the IVAS headset may eventually be integrated into an AR rifle scope.
“When you are out there shooting and being shot at, the last thing you want to
worry about is another piece of equipment,” he says. And technology does not
need to be as expansive as a metaverse to be useful. “We need to think a bit
more about this metaverse metaphor—which is powerful but also has its
limitations.”

Updated 19/05/2022, 11:00 am ET: The article previously stated incorrectly that
Palantir has invested in Red6.






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Will Knight is a senior writer for WIRED, covering artificial intelligence. He
was previously a senior editor at MIT Technology Review, where he wrote about
fundamental advances in AI and China’s AI boom. Before that, he was an editor
and writer at New Scientist. He studied anthropology and journalism in... Read
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Topicsartificial intelligenceMilitarymilitary techAir ForcedarpaVRNavyaugmented
realitywarvirtual realityMetaverse




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