Simulated Training in the Military: Where Can We Go from Here?

Within the training community at large, a revolution has taken place over the past decade. Advances in Virtual Reality (VR) technology have created an environment in which traditional training pedagogies, which focus on static, one-size-fits-all approaches, are being supplanted with broad-scale, dynamic, interactive, and multi-modal approaches to learning. Two key factors driving these changes include recent technological advances and the need to support the user in assimilating increasingly vast, often-times complex quantities of information. Understandably, there is an inherent tension between current state of the art technologies, and user demand. Bounding this complex state of affairs is the need to develop, validate, and update models of training. Add to this the desire for a degree of standardization and it becomes clear that applying VR technology to training is not as straightforward as simply developing high fidelity environments, displayed on cutting-edge hardware. The degree to which these various concerns must be addressed is guided, to a large extent, by the needs of the specific community. Nowhere are these issues more apparent than in the military, whose demands for providing comprehensive training, across a broad range of skill levels, at a moment’s notice, can no longer be adequately met by traditional training technologies or current training pedagogies.