“Build us a holodeck”

For decades, the entertainment industry and the military were advancing
the science of simulation on widely divergent tracks. The Pentagon
focused on developing high-end proprietary systems like the Close
Combat Tactical Trainer – a networked tank simulator that costs about
$1 million – while game developers loaded $49 first-person shooters
with enough pixelated firepower to convey the dynamics of skeletal
trauma and the physics of explosions in ever-closer-to-real time.

Those tracks converged at a 1996 workshop hosted by Michael Zyda, now
the head of the simulation lab at the Naval Postgraduate School. Former
Disney Imagineer Danny Hillis and Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull
brainstormed about “experiential” computing and electronic storytelling
with representatives from Darpa, Intel, and Industrial Light &
Magic, as well as the future head of ICT, a Paramount TV exec named
Richard Lindheim. The papers from that workshop persuaded the Army to
launch the Institute for Creative Technologies in 1999.

Now that consumer gaming engines like Unreal are able to render
cinematic-quality graphics in real time, even big-ticket munitions are
trivial to simulate. Launching a rocket in a live exercise can cost
$10,000 or more; the price tag for the Defense Department’s Millennium
Challenge – a three-week exercise in 2002 with 13,500 participants -
was $250 million. By contrast, the Army’s bill for underwriting ICT for
the last five years was $45 million. Rehearsing even a single mission
in the field also requires weeks of planning and construction. Using
synthetic environments like JFETS, the Army will eventually be able to
code new mission rehearsals incorporating up-to-the-minute intelligence
in a single day.

Full article…