Is US army building metaverse?

• Metaverses have existed in gaming world for long time.
• US army has been developing a Synthetic Training Environment (STE).
• Difference is that STE is designed army personnel to rehearse missions while metaverses are for entertainment uses.

With the metaverse gaining popularity, many believe that the idea and concept of virtual worlds are new. However, they have existed in the gaming world for a long time.

The computer game Second Life, for example, built a community of millions of people who "live" together in a virtual space.

Not just games, simulation technology has been in the use of the US Army for some time for training purposes. When it comes to the cloud-supported, scalable metaverse, no one has gone ahead of the military.

Since 2017, the US army has been developing a Synthetic Training Environment (STE) which aims to combine all simulation systems into one, reported Venture Beat.

The STE will replace older simulation programs and produce a connected system for joint training.

It is different from the typical server-based approaches. For example, it will produce highly realistic terrain data for a digital twin of the Earth. New terrain management platforms like Mantle ETM will make sure that all systems run on the exact same terrain data. This means trainees on a flight simulator will see the same plateaus, trees, or buildings as a trainee in a tank simulator.

Better scaling with computational power will lead to better real-world representation of important details like terrain complexity which traditional servers are unable to support.

STE aims to extract data from all available resources to create simulated conditions like pedestrians and vehicles all at once.

The difference, however, is that STE is designed especially for the army personnel to train better and rehearse missions. Meanwhile, metaverses are for entertainment uses which is why they do not require an accurate pictorial representation of the planet.