This virtuality standard emerged from Orlando, Fla., in the early '90s, from the potent nexus of Orlando's Institute for Simulation & Training, Orlando's University of Central Florida, Orlando's US Army STRICOM, Orlando's Naval Training Systems Center, and the Orlando-based, 400-strong Standards for the Interoperability of Defense Simulations working groups. (One mustn't rule out the possible cultural influence of Disneyworld, either.)
They demo'd the new standard on a network link-up at I/ITSEC #14, live. They went for the opportunity. They had to rip up some of the Ethernet wiring that they'd laid before the show, because it had so many crimp-failures from the tramping legions of wingtip-shod vendor feet. It got hairy for a while there. But they got the demo to run.
Of course a system crashed. Somebody's system always crashes at any multimedia demo. It's like a force of nature. In the case of the DIS Interoperability Demo, it was the Mac Quadra 900 running the slide show. The sucker iced when its screensaver kicked in, and the sweaty-palmed techies from IDA had to re-boot live. They winged it, and got the slides up. It looked okay. Most people didn't notice.
The protocol worked just fine. They had a big digitized section of the terrain from Fort Hunter-Liggett in California, running live on-screen, cunningly combined with an actual long-distance link to an actual wired tank in actual Fort Hunter-Liggett.
"Seamless simulation," live onstage.
The demo was far from real virtual war. There was some ritual gunfire here or there, but this wasn't real combat training. This was a fashion show in seam- free camouflage haute-couture.
Everybody took a formal runway-model turn, up on the big virtual stage. With live narration at the mike: "The bogeys are generated by Bolt Beranek & Newman." General Dynamics Land Systems Division modeled the virtual M1A2 Battle Tank. From their own show-booth, General Electric thoughtfully supplied an Abrams tank and an F-16. Hughes proudly displayed a robot spy-drone. McDonnell Douglas had a surface-to-air missile, and Lockheed demo'd a virtual Patriot battery. Twenty- four companies - twenty-five, if you count the guys who supplied the video projectors. All of them packed snugly in the DARPA virtual corral.
They had the brass lined-up right at the front, in a row of folding chairs. A rear admiral here, a couple of lieutenant generals there; a full brace of Cold War veterans, braid and chest ribbons and hats. The brass watched the three monster screens with squint-eyed, show-me skepticism.
And the brass weren't blown-away, either. The network looked pretty good, and it ran without crashing, but they weren't stunned or amazed. The brass didn't leave San Antonio raving that they'd just seen the future and it worked. They clearly didn't know quite what to make of what they had just seen. One got the impression that they figured this virtual-network stuff might turn into something useful someday. Cute gimmick. Clever. Worth a look, I guess. Learn something new every day. Glad we came down here to I/ITSEC. Lemme know when we can use this to invade Normandy.
The brass were on public exhibit themselves, actually. Whether they knew it or not, they were legitimizers, stalking horses, Trojan Horses. Generals and admirals from a very long-lasting but swiftly vanished era. Compared to their tech-crazed subordinates - the Southwest Asian, baby-boomer, carnivorous cyber- colonels, majors, and captains who are now actually running the digitized New World Order American military - the Cold War guys looked like a line of stuffed ducks.
Today Kuwait, Tommorow the World
There was some interesting stuff backstage at I/ITSEC. There was a big rope- handled canvas bag full of the tools of the virtual trade: hex crimpers, nut drivers, metric wrenches, soldering wire, cable strippers. There were big ugly powerful rock'n'roll amps stenciled PROPERTY OF US GOVT INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSES, and big color display monitors shimmed up on cardboard, and there were powerstrips and orange extension cords and some loose Mac floppies. And there was a handscrawled brag on a backstage chalkboard, written by the techies from Orlando: "DIS Interoperability Demonstration. Today's feature: DIS. Tomorrow: the holodeck!"
The natural question arises: Is this some kind of wacky egghead DARPA media hype, or is this a genuine military technology? Can governments really exercise national military power - kick ass, kill people - merely by using some big amps and some color monitors and some keyboards, and a bunch of other namby-pamby sci-fi "holodeck" stuff?
The answer is yes.
Yes, this technology is lethal. Yes, it is a real strategic asset. Military virtual reality is not a toy or a joke. There is a lot of vaporware in "virtual reality," but this technology definitely will help people kill each other. Virtual reality happens to be very fashionable at the moment, with some ritzy pop-cultural overtones, but that is accidental. Whether or not VR becomes a major new medium of commercial entertainment, or some vital new mode of artistic expression, it still will be of enormous use to the military. Thriving civilian VR will probably make military VR expand even faster; giving the virtual battlefield better and glossier set designs.
There was a demo at I/ITSEC called "Project 2851." This is a new standard for digital terrains, a standard for all American armed forces. It will let them share terrain databases on any number of different machines.
But there is another aspect to Project 2851. Project 2851 is about the virtual reproduction and archiving of the entire planet. Simulator technology has reached a point today in which satellite photographs can be transformed automatically into 3-D virtual landscapes. These landscapes can be stored in databases, then used as highly accurate training grounds for tanks, aircraft, helicopters, SEALS, Delta Force commandos.
What does this mean? It means that soon there will be no such thing as "unknown territory" for the United States military. In the future - soon, very soon - the United States military will know the entire planet just like the back of its hand. It will know other countries better than those countries know themselves.
During the Battle of 73 Easting, an American tank regiment came roaring out of an Iraqi desert that the Iraqis themselves could not navigate. The Iraqis couldn't enter their own desert, because they would have died there. But the Americans had satellite navigation units, so the Americans knew where they were on our planet's surface right down to the yard.
The Stealth pilots who blew downtown Baghdad into hell-and-gone had already flown those urban landscapes before they ever put their butts in the cockpit seat. They knew every ridge, every skyline, every road - they'd already seen them on console screens.
During Desert Storm, some Iraqi soldiers actually surrendered to unmanned flying drones. These aircraft are disembodied eyes, disembodied screens, network peripherals basically, with a man behind them somewhere many miles away. And that man has another screen in front of him, and a keyboard at hand, and a wire from that keyboard that can snake through a network and open a Vent of Hell.
This is what it all means. Say you are in an army attempting to resist the United States. You have big tanks around you, and ferocious artillery, and a gun in your hands. And you are on the march.