Currently the Metaverse is used primarily in a commercial aspect, with the main use being games and entertainment experiences. Using digital twins, headsets such as the Meta Quest 2 can provide incredibly immersive experiences. However, the main limitation associated with them is they are not super realistic and are noticeably ‘cartoony’. It is largely not an issue as there is no immediate need for it in a commercial use.
Recently the US and UK military has started to develop their own digital twins and metaverse to create a hyper realistic training environment. In an application such as this the need for realism is vital and if successful could significantly change the metaverse as we currently know it. Before we dive in, lets cover what is the Metaverse and what is a digital twin?
What Is The Metaverse?
There is a subtle but very important difference between “the Metaverse” and “a Metaverse”. “The Metaverse” represents the concept behind it where it is a series of loosely interconnected virtual worlds/environments. It is also associated with “Web 3.0”, the idea of a new webspace where the power of control is taken out of the hands of a few dominant entities. For more information read about Connection Between Web3 And The Metaverse. Currently, the Metaverse is comprised of a lot of individual “free” Metaverses that are not connected to one another and rely mostly upon ad revenue to operate. This signifies the old web 2.0 model, and it is likely it will transition towards the web 3.0 model.
What Is A Digital Twin?
A digital twin is exactly what it sounds like, it is a virtual version of a physical environment. These digital twins are part of the makeup of the virtual worlds within a Metaverse and the quality of the experiences a user encounters depends on the realism of the digital twin. Different applications have different requirements and the quality of it will vary from case to case.
Militarising The Metaverse
The largest difference between the commercial and military metaverse is the need for realism, high quality and low latency is that much more important for the military use. The US Army is running a program named STE (Synthetic Training Environment) with the aim to create a 1:1 digital world of the Earth for training purposes according to GeoSpatial World. This is done by using scalable services on cloud architecture to allocate the necessary resources that allows the rendering of previously impossible scenarios. In a commercial space the largest number of entities loaded in at any time is generally in the thousands.
Even then this a stretch due to the limitations of the headsets processing power, storage, and the fact that most users use untethered headsets that are inherently weaker than tethered machines. Whereas these new military developed digital twins will have millions of entities loaded in and at a much higher quality. This is significant as it will likely replace the majority, if not all the current training simulations in place.
If these advancements designed for military purposes can used for commercial purposes, it will radically change the landscape as we know it and it is likely this is only a matter of time before it occurs.
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