The US Military Is Building Its Own Metaverse

Two fighter pilots performed a high-altitude experiment. A few thousand feet above the desert of California, in a pair of Berkut 540 jets, they donned custom augmented reality headsets to connect to a system that superimposed a glowing image of a refueling aircraft over them in the sky. One of the pilots did a refueling maneuver with a virtual tanker while the other looked on. There is a military metaverse.

Silicon Valley is gripped by metaverse mania. As tech companies and corporations scramble to develop strategies for virtual worlds, many defense startups, contractors, and funders are talking up the metaverse, even if its definition and utility aren't always clear.

The defense world already has the key technologies needed for the metaverse,augmented and virtual reality, headmounted displays, 3D simulations and virtual environments built by artificial intelligence. The result is a lot less polished, cutesy, and spacious than the virtual world vision of Mark Zuckerberg. Even if the underlying tech stutters in the civilian realm, there is a good chance that it will take off.

Fighter pilots have been able to practice dogfighting against virtual opponents, including Chinese and Russian warplanes, thanks to a mix of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and video game graphics. Red 6 says the technology it is developing will deliver a far more realistic test of a pilot's abilities.

Red6's augmented reality technology has to work in more extreme conditions than consumer headsets. Robinson says that the company is working on a platform that will allow many different scenarios to be represented in augmented or virtual reality.

Some of the latest military systems include metaphysics-related ideas. The new helmet for the F-35 fighter jet has an augmented reality display that shows data from around the aircraft, as well as video footage from around the aircraft. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) was announced by the US Army as a version of its augmented reality system for warfighters.

Military training has become routine in recent years with the use of virtual reality and augmented reality. Project BlueShark was developed by the Office of Naval Research and the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. Project Avenger is used to help train US Navy pilots. The US Air Force is using virtual reality to teach pilots. Chronic pain and post-traumatic stress can be treated with virtual reality. Boeing has created an augmented reality environment that allows mechanics to practice working on planes.

The US military is exploring more complex virtual worlds. Virtual worlds can be connected and combined in a way that resembles metaverse thinking. The US Air Force held a high-level conference in December of 2021, involving over 250 people in locations stretching from the US to Japan.

The founder of the company that was acquired by Facebook, Palmer Luckey, says that the decision by the company to go all-in on virtual reality and the metaverse created a massive amount of expectation in the commercial world.