3-D simulations aid in military training

Molly Ball

Wednesday, April 21, 2004 | 10:54 a.m.

You strap on the flickering 3-D goggles and pull the thick electronic-sensor glove up to your wrist. Suddenly a virtual landscape appears around you: the shifting, golden sands of the Iraqi desert, seen from above. It is your job to land the Army helicopter on those treacherous sands.

This is far more serious than an exciting and timely video game. What you learn here is real. It's a state-of-the-art military simulation being developed at Nevada's Desert Research Institute.

The institute recently received $3 million in federal funds toward its goal of building a Computer Automated Virtual Environment facility, or CAVE -- a virtual-reality chamber that projects three-dimensional images from all six walls, creating what experts call "total immersion."

The institute's CAVE, to be built in Reno, would be only the third such facility in North America. The institute's scientists have contracted with the Defense Department to come up with desert-terrain simulations that the military can use for training.

"We have a war in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. They're both deserts," noted Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who serves on the Senate's Defense Appropriations subcommittee and helped get the institute the federal money.

"We know desert warfare creates unique problems," Reid said. "In the CAVE, you can set up sandstorms, or anything else that happens in the desert, and prepare our troops for different kinds of desert conditions."

The Iraqi desert is not the same as the Nevada desert, or the Yuma, Ariz., desert that the Army currently uses to train. It is substantially drier, with less plant life, and many parts are more rocky than sandy, said Eric McDonald, a geologist at the institute who works with the military on desert-terrain projects.

"Each desert is very unique," just like different types of forests," McDonald said. Scientists classify many different types of "drylands," based on rainfall levels and cycles, topography, plant life and other differences.

McDonald would use data from satellite images to create simulations of real places in deserts around the world.

For the Army, understanding how to maneuver in a particular desert's conditions could be crucial.

Last March, preparations for war in Iraq were complicated by intense sand storms that grounded helicopters, gummed up airplane and tank engines and reduced visibility to nearly zero.

And in 1980, a mission that involved helicopters sent to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran went afoul when one of the aircraft crashed, partly because the crews were not prepared for strong desert winds. Eight crew members died and the rescue mission was canceled. The hostages were released the next year.

McDonald is already working with the military on a project called Desert Terrain Forecasting for Military Operations, providing guidance for helicopter pilots about where to land in the desert.

"The next step is visualization," he said.

"Let's say you really want to understand some of the characteristics of intense dust storms," McDonald said. "It would be hard and expensive to set up (an artificial storm) experimentally. But with the visualization, it's like a computer game. You can get inside and change different factors."

The CAVE, a 10-by-10-by- 10-foot cube, is like a walk-in, interactive hologram: sensors track your movements as you maneuver in it, so if, for example, you turn your head to the right, the three-dimensional environment adjusts according to your perspective. If you steer your helicopter upwards, you see the ground drop away beneath you.

Here's how it works: Projectors all around the outside of the cube project images onto its walls that can be seen by people within. They wear special glasses that, while more sophisticated than the red-and-blue glasses worn at 3-D movies, perform the same function. Put them on, and the landscape springs up around you.

To navigate the virtual world, you can use a glove, a joystick, a keyboard, a mouse, even a treadmill. Sensors on your body tell the computer where you are in the CAVE. Millions of lines of computer code do the rest.

By changing the visualization's settings, a pilot could try landing his helicopter in a certain wind speed and temperature, then fiddle with the controls to try a totally different set of circumstances. Or the pilot might try the same landing on different parts of a given area, learning which places are safe and which are dangerous.

What the institute is trying to do is more complex than the visualization projects that are today's norm, McDonald said.

"We've seen a sub going through water, or a tank being built," he said. "That's mechanical; we know how it works. But a simulation that can actually work with the background environment -- you're talking about taking the real world and having it be part of the simulation."

Being immersed in virtual reality can teach a pilot much more than reading a manual ever could, McDonald said. "For many people, it's easier to process things visually than on a chart or graph."

And being in an environment that feels real is important when you're training your reflexes for a situation in which you'll have to respond to instantaneously, noted Jeffrey Brum, marketing manager for Iowa-based Fakespace Systems Inc., which designs and builds CAVEs.

There are about 200 CAVEs in the world, but almost all of them have only four sides: floor and three walls. In the U.S., only two have all six sides: one at Iowa State University and one at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Another is being planned for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The six-sided CAVE is superior to the four-sided cave because "you are completely immersed," said Brum, whose company built the Iowa facility. "There are no blanks in the image, no matter where you turn in the virtual world. You can look up; you can look behind you. It can be quite compelling."

This experience could be particularly valuable for Tim Brown, a climatologist at the institute who wants to use the CAVE to simulate wildfires and train firefighters.

Prescribed burning, in which forest fires are started deliberately to manage the land according to its natural cycles, is an important environmental tool, but it has to be carefully controlled, Brown noted.

"What if you could take the area you want to burn and bring in the virtual environment?" he said. By integrating meteorological models, fire behavior models, and smoke dispersion and transport models, "a team could light virtual fires and see several possible outcomes," depending on factors like wind speed or humidity.

The Desert Research Institute has requested $12 million from the state Board of Regents for a facility for its Visualization Laboratory, which would include the CAVE. If that comes through, building the CAVE and hiring faculty and staff to run the laboratory would cost about $10 million, including the $3 million already received from the federal government, said J. Scott Hauger, the institute's vice president for government and business relations.

The institute views those funds as "seed money" and hopes the laboratory will be self-sustaining within five years of its completion in 2006 or 2007, Hauger said. The laboratory would pay for itself by taking contracts from government, business and other research institutions to perform simulations.

"Our goal is to become the premier center for environmental sciences visualization in the West, if not in the United States," Hauger said.

Most of the CAVE's applications would be research and development for science and technology. CAVEs have been used to help the Army design tanks, to get molecular scientists up close and personal with complicated proteins, and to assist companies in designing better tractors and chicken coops.

But Hauger also envisions a very Las Vegas use for the CAVE. While the main Visualization Laboratory and the six-sided CAVE are planned for Reno, the institute is considering installing a four-sided CAVE in Las Vegas.

"One notion I have is that, as we've seen with (casino mogul) Steve Wynn, people make billion-dollar investments in casinos," Hauger said. "Part of this is providing a certain experience to customers, even before they walk into the door.

"This technology could be used to simulate that, model it," he said. "When the casino is still a patch of barren desert, you can walk up to it, open the door, and dive in the pool."

Instead of asking focus groups what they think of a picture or description of the proposed casino, a developer could measure their reactions -- even their heart rate -- as they walked through a virtual version of it.

After all, said Brown, "visualization may allow you to see something you had no idea was there by looking at the numbers or a flat screen. The mind reacts differently when you have the third dimension, especially when you're immersed in it."

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