Next time these soldiers might use virtual reality to train instead US Marines Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

Ready soldier one. The US army is creating a virtual replica of the planet to drill troops in. The idea is that it will be so realistic that practising missions in virtual reality will be almost as good as the real thing.

The latest development is a tool that can automatically make a virtual reality environment of almost anywhere. The user simply draws a rectangle on a map, and then the tool trawls publicly available data sources, such as Open Street Map, to …