War Games

The U.S. military has constructed a massive virtual reality platform to help train infantry soldiers in realistic battlefields filled with millions of artificial intelligence agents.

Futurism first reported on the Synthetic Training Environment (STE) back in April, when the U.S. Army published a whitepaper describing its ability to simulate real cities in the U.S. and North Korea.

Now software developers who contributed to the VR platform opened up about their work in an interview with Digital Trends, describing how virtual reality can help the U.S. train a more combat-ready and versatile military.

Global Combat

The goal of the VR platform is to simulate anywhere on Earth that the army might someday battle, preparing soldiers for the area’s terrain before they actually ship out, explained Pete Morrison, an executive at Bohemia Interactive Simulations, a company that helped develop the STE.

“This would enable the Army to conduct virtual training and complex simulations anywhere on a virtual representation of the Earth,” Morrison said in the Digital Trends interview. “STE will leverage cloud technologies to deliver training to anywhere it’s needed, ensuring a common and high-fidelity whole-Earth terrain representation for a multitude of different simulation systems.”

MMO

Now, the Army is ramping up the scale of its simulations to support more “intelligent entities” than there are residents in Vermont.

“What’s exciting about what we’re doing is that the Army will be able to dramatically scale up the number of intelligent entities represented in simulation scenarios to the millions,” Morrison told Digital Trends. “Previously, only tens or hundreds of thousands of entities would be represented, and those would be aggregated to reduce the complexity of simulating large forces.”

READ MORE: The U.S. Army is building a giant VR battlefield to train soldiers virtually [Digital Trends]

More on military VR: Soldiers Are Training in Virtual Environments Generated From Real Cities