The Marines Are Marching into the Metaverse. Here’s What That Could Look Like.
From the Battle of Belleau Wood to the shores of Inchon, the Marine Corps has fought in some of the most hostile conditions America’s wars have had to offer. Now, to better prepare for an increasingly unstable future, it’s entering the metaverse.
Last month, Marines with the Marine Corps Platform Integration Center, or MCPIC, successfully fielded a “real-time pilot set in a planetary-scale metaverse environment,” according to CGI Federal Inc., an information technology (IT) and business consulting firm that presented the pilot to the service.
Not to be confused with Facebook parent company Meta’s use of the term, the metaverse that the Marines are hoping to dive into is also a simulated environment, one that will take billions of dollars in Corps equipment and make “faithful twins” of it in a simulated reality.
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“The pilot involved integrating the Marine Corps Platform Integration Center [MCPIC] logistics and asset management systems with digital twins, or virtual replicas of physical assets in a simulated world environment,” the CGI press release said. “The integration demonstrated how the Marine Corps can achieve enhanced visualization, real-time monitoring, simulation capabilities, and predictive analytics that will augment training and education, as well as operational efficiency.”
In simple terms, this metaverse is billed to be anything between a tabletop exercise of the future to hands-on planning from anywhere in the world: weather simulations, fuel-level measurements, and orientation and locations down to meters — the high-tech potential for the Corps seems endless.
“We’re focused on bridging the real and the surreal a little more closely,” Victor Foulk, the vice president of emerging technologies for CGI, told Military.com in a recent interview.
Right now for the Marine Corps, that means taking equipment, scanning it and replicating it into a massive simulated environment with real-world mechanics, physics and geolocation.
What might that look like for the Marine who would use it, and when exactly would it end up in their hands? The Corps is still figuring it out — but virtual reality (VR) headsets and Star Wars-like interactive maps are not out of the question, CGI and the Corps said.
The push for the metaverse comes from a pressing requirement, the Corps said. As the service sets its sights on the Pacific, Maj. Jeff Planteen, the operations officer for Blount Island Command in Florida, where the pilot was fielded, explained that the need for distributed planning is increasingly important.
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