Witness to a natural convergence: distributed simulation, persistent worlds, interactive gaming, command, control, and future ops. What's next?

ABSTRACT

This April marks the 20th anniversary of DARPA's initiation of the SIMNET program, the large-scale networking of military simulators. As an early example of persistent world technology, it seeded ideas in the commercial gaming industry that have now produced very sophisticated, commercially viable, 24x7 virtual worlds. But in addition, this class of technology is recognized by many as also 'command and control'technology, and from a higher view one can argue that interactive gaming, C2, and ultimately future operations of information-savvy military forces are converging: At their core is the same information technology, a common information infrastructure. This talk will extrapolate from these current trends and speculate on where this convergence will take us.