A Lunch Meeting Worth Attending

I am usually excited about lunch tomorrow, likely to be enjoyed with a BLT on this tasteless low calorie bread my wife buys. It isn't the food I'm looking forward to, rather the company.

The DoD Blogger Roundtable folks are hosting a very interesting conversation which can be heard on blogger talk radio here at 1:00pm EST. The topic:

Dr. Goldberg and Mr. Sottilare will discuss Technology in Army Training, specifically the use of gaming and other techniques in training 21st century Soldiers. They plan to discuss the current research their organizations are conducting; of particular note will be a projects using multi-player game technology to train units in different locations.

Last time I posted on gaming and virtual worlds, I got a great comment from a regular reader:

You know, maybe I've been taking this blog a bit too seriously.

I don't know why, but that is one of my favorite comments. But... we all start our careers somewhere, and I was one of those guys who was the right age and professional experience at the right time to jump into the virtual world industry during its birth. It was a great experience, particularly for someone like me who did not go to college and at the time had more experience with IP protocols and technologies than 99.9% of the college graduates with computer related professional education. Every college graduate at that time was a master of inline code, but found the mainframes being retired in mass within the decade following their graduation. Most had to learn object oriented programming on the job. It is amazing how quickly technology has evolved.

Nearly a dozen years later I find myself removed from the gaming industry, and very curious to see how the Army is adapting virtual world technology for their own needs. My experience is the vast majority of folks over 40 are interested in observing the technology, but that same vast majority of folks over 40 don't really understand virtual worlds or its usefulness. However the culture in the Army is different than the culture of the private sector, and adapting towards the usefulness of technology is one thing the military does do very well.

The use of virtual world technology has already had practical effects to society as a whole though, US researchers have used virtual world technology to study the housing market bubble and effects, and virtual world technology has also been used to predict and protect against the effects of counterfeiting and inflation. Another use is how economists have used virtual worlds to predict the effects of globalization. There are several other applications in use today for economic, social science, and marketing research.

I dug up some old biographies from both speakers.

Robert A. Sottilare is currently the Chief Technology Officer for the U.S. Army Research Development & Engineering Command Simulation and Training Technology Center (RDECOM-STTC) in Orlando, Florida. Mr. Sottilare has 24 years of experience in various modeling, simulation and training positions as an engineer, program manager and researcher within both U.S. Army and U.S. Navy training organizations. Mr. Sottilare has a Masters in Modeling and Simulation from the University of Central Florida and is an alumnus of the Advanced Program Managers Course at the Defense Systems Management College (DSMC). He is currently pursuing a doctorate in Modeling & Simulation at the University of Central Florida.

Stephen Goldberg, Ph.D. is the Chief of the US Army Research Institute’s Simulator Systems Research Unit in Orlando, Florida. He has over 30 years experience leading and conducting training and Soldier performance research. He received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has authored numerous technical reports, book chapters, and conference presentations. He recently completed a five year term as Chair of the multi-nation Training Technology Panel of The Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP). He is also US National Leader and co-chair of a NATO Research Study Group investigating human factors issues in the military uses of Virtual and Augmented Reality technology. Steve has served the Society for Military Psychology as Newsletter Editor, Program Chair, Secretary, and President. During his presidency he arranged the first cosponsored a mid-year symposium with Division 21. He currently serves as Chair of the Fellows Committee. He is also an Associate Editor of Military Psychology, the society’s journal.

Based on what I know of Mr. Sottilare, Land Warrior could come up as a topic. For those of you who use the submarine training simulation systems, I'm almost positive those systems were in part developed by Mr. Sottilare.

According to Virtual Worlds Management, subscriptions for MMO gaming has now reached over 1 billion annually, and is expected to rise to $1.5 billion over the next 3 years. Based on my own experience with IGE, the black market for virtual world gaming is somewhere around $1 billion or more annually, and I'd be shocked if the 'farmer' market' (second definition) wasn't at least a quarter billion.

Among the aspects I hope to learn more about include how the Army is using virtual worlds for political, social, tactical, and strategic training. For example, one can teach Asian culture, or tribal culture with virtual world environments as part of training and simulation, is this being done? Virtual Worlds are also excellent for quickly learning the basics of foreign languages. I'm also curious about the relationship between the Army and the big players of the virtual world gaming industry.