The US military, not Meta, is building the metaverse

Ever since Facebook rebranded as Meta late last year seems to have attached every industry to the metaverse. However, the language surrounding different ‘metaverses’ in different industries is getting confusing. We don’t yet have a shared imagination for the metaverse and the technology needed to build it.

Virtual worlds that could be considered metaverses have been around in gaming for quite some time. The computer game Second Life, for example, has “built a sustainable community of millions who ‘live together’ in virtual spaces.” The idea is clearly not new. The current metaverse hype cycle revolves around marketing big tech players. Each of these companies wants to steer the conversation toward its technology. Meta owns VR headset developer Oculus, so it makes sense that the buzz around the metaverse is driving its customers to buy more headsets.

In other words, companies want to keep users dependent on their technology within a closed, commercialized ecosystem. Despite their rhetoric, big tech has provided a rather narrow view of the metaverse. Simulation technology has the power to be so much more. I envision an open virtual world that supports thousands of concurrent players and provides valuable, immersive use cases. The scope of this vision requires an open cloud architecture with native support for cloud scalability.

By prioritizing cloud development and setting clear goals, military organizations have made significant strides toward building an actual realization of this metaverse.

Army Progress

In terms of the industry’s progress toward the cloud-enabled, scalable metaverse, no organization has come further than the US military. Their Synthetic training environment (STE) has been under development since 2017. The STE aims to replace all legacy simulation programs and integrate different systems into a single, connected system for combined arms and joint training.

The STE is fundamentally different from traditional server-based approaches. For example, it will host a 1:1 digital twin of Earth on a cloud architecture that will stream high-fidelity (photorealistic) terrain data to connected simulations. New grounds management platforms such as: Coat ETM ensures that all connected systems work on exactly the same terrain data. For example, trainees in a tank simulator see the same trees, bushes and buildings as the pilot in a connected flight simulator, enabling combined weapons operations.

Cloud scalability (i.e. scaling with available computing power) will allow for a better real-world representation of essential details such as population density and terrain complexity that traditional servers could not support. The ambition of STE is to automatically pull from available data sources to display millions of simulated entities, such as AI-based vehicles or pedestrians, all at once.

A uniform image?

Despite its advanced depiction of terrain, large scale and ease of use, the STE will not exactly represent the popular conception of the metaverse. This is because the military designed it in light of specific goals. STE focuses allow soldiers to better train, experiment with systems and practice missions. Accurate representations of large areas of the Earth are needed to achieve these goals. That’s why developers are creating a high-fidelity, digital twin of the entire planet.

Commercial metaverses created for entertainment or commercial use may not require an accurate representation of Earth. It will likely be more aesthetically pleasing, fantasy worlds where users can perform actions, such as flying or teleporting, that don’t represent real life. Training metaverses designed for industries that don’t require the full size of the planet (such as healthcare) may also look different. In the future, there may be no metaverse at all as companies will create different digital environments for specialized purposes.

Still, the military metaverse could be a microcosm of what could soon be a large-scale, open-source digital world not controlled or dominated by a few commercial entities. I think the STE will be used in daily training by 2030, a relatively short timeframe compared to the level of innovation needed. STE success will pave the way for all the cloud-based, open source worlds to come, and will help prove that the value of the metaverse goes far beyond that of a marketing gimmick.

Pete Morrison is CCO at Bohemia Interactive Simulations (BISim) and TerraSim Inc.