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          Wired News

          War Is Virtual Hell

          by Michael Stroud

          3:00 a.m. 19.Aug.99.PDT

          LOS ANGELES -- The US Army of the future will learn to fight
          its battles the virtual way -- trained in part by the
          University of Southern California School of
          Cinema-Television.

          The Army and USC are both part of a new Army-funded
          $44.3-million program to develop hardware and software
          simulating actual battlefields that give recruits the look
          and feel -- and even the smell -- of 21st century war.

          Soldiers will work with weapons that come with built-in
          instruction guides. They'll use holographic viewers to drive
          tanks that recoil and smell of cordite when the virtual
          shells are launched. Battlefields will be indistinguishable
          from real life.

          "The more realistic the training is, the more useful it is,"
          Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera said. "That's why we do
          live fire exercises, down in the dirt. We want to engage all
          five senses."

          Never mind war; from the entertainment industry's
          perspective -- represented at a USC press conference
          Wednesday by Motion Picture Association of America chief
          Jack Valenti -- the collaboration promises new forms of
          filmmaking, games, and location-based entertainment.

          USC will use the money to create a new Institute for
          Creative Technologies in beachside Marina del Rey. Faculty
          and students from the film-TV school, USC's Annenberg School
          of Communications, its School of Engineering, and other
          disciplines such as medicine and psychology, will converge
          there to create next-generation virtual classrooms.

          The institute could develop programs "for everything from
          putting high school students in a simulated car while
          they're learning to drive, to training soldiers what the
          streets look like before landing in Mogadishu for a warlike
          action," said Cornelius Sullivan, who will oversee the
          development of the program.

          Under its agreement with USC -- known around the world for
          its Trojan football team -- the Army is guaranteed to retain
          at least a 51 percent stake in the project. For now, the
          Army appears to be keeping a low profile in the research and
          stressing the civilian applications of the advances in
          technology.

          Still, there are unanswered questions: Can partners from
          such disparate disciplines get along? Will traditionally
          liberal Hollywood buy into the idea of joining hands with
          the military? And will ever more immersive technology make
          people even more addicted to their computer and gaming
          experiences?

          Sullivan allows that the different cultures at the institute
          "will have to learn to work together." As for Hollywood,
          "it's not for everyone," he says, wryly acknowledging that
          he hasn't taken any calls yet from Oliver Stone.

          As for possible misuses of the institute's research: "Yes,
          there are people who have used technology throughout time to
          do terrible things," said the Army's Caldera. "But the
          reality is that technology has tremendously more power to
          improve our lives than cause harm."

          http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/21329.html


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