Gov/Military

While at Lockheed Martin, the Ultisim team under Virtual World Labs, won a contract with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense to create an open source platform for deep collaboration between humans and simulations called the Virtual World Framework.  

 

The Department of Defense (DoD) cannot continue to do business as usual. In FY15, the DoD spent $14.1B in Modeling and Simulation related activities. Approximately 40% of that budget was used for simulators, war gaming, and modeling. The vision of the VWF is to reduce the funding currently used to support M&S activities in direct support of pressure to reduce spending and increase efficacy of existing/emerging technology.

 

The DoD needs a tool to tie together its myriad, stove-piped, specialty simulations solutions. It needs a tool to extend and expand its ability to train an increasing number of personnel across ever-widening distances. DoD stresses a need to reduce and re-use technology and to find more cost-efficient means to provide the most advanced technological and pedagogical systems of training. It’s not just about training DoD personnel however.

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In the Information Age, those (individuals and organizations) who gain a comfortable fluency with the digital tools that are remaking the world will not only prevail over those who don’t,  but they will begin to appear super-human. 

 

We are surrounded by immersive, personalized social media and new technologies for interacting with information and with synthetic worlds like VR headsets from Oculus (Facebook), HTC Vive, Wearality etc, as well as AR devices and technologies like HoloLens and Magic Leap paired with new gestural and voice interfaces with AI and machine learning.  Traditional education systems do not allow for the pace of information sharing and immersion that this wave of technologies will provide to youth on a regular basis and modernization/customization of education is becoming essential to its effectiveness.

 

The intersection of technologies and the speed/volume of data delivery create a perfect storm of possibility for this system to provide the most good at the best cost.