In addition, he said that ONR is also looking at the technology transition from an “immersive virtual environment” to an “augmented reality environment.”

He said that ONR is also looking at the technology transition from an “immersive virtual environment” to an “augmented reality environment.”

He offered the analogy of “the yellow ‘first down’ line on televised football games,” explaining, “That’s really not there. That’s superimposed using computer graphics. Think about that kind of technology, where you could superimpose synthetic entities, synthetic buildings, a variety of different things so that you could turn a small unadorned training space into a virtual representation of the battlefield. And that’s where we’re going today, with the AITT [Augmented Immersive Team Trainer] that we’re working on today.”

The AITT program noted by Allard began in FY 11 as a development effort designed to enable immersive training of squad calls for fire in the field, to include close air support missions.

The application of augmented reality will combine virtual information with a real world view. For AITT, realistic virtual elements, such as fixed and rotary wing aircraft, targets such as insurgents, tanks and buildings, and weapon effects, to include artillery and mortar fire, are combined with a real world scene and displayed in both a head worn display module and in simulated tactical equipment like binoculars.

AITT program plans target a final demonstration and subsequent transition to the training community in FY ‘15.

“I think our next few studies are going to be looking at the AITT, which is an augmented reality trainer for some forward observer work,” he added. “And we’re going to see what different components of augmented reality afford the soldiers who are going through the virtual training.”

Meanwhile, ONR is continuing to conduct and support research with direct applicability to AITT and other next generation training systems.

For example, during an informal discussion of university representatives attending I/ITSEC 2013, Siroberto Scerbo, a Ph.D. student with the Human/Computer Interaction Institute in the computer science department at Virginia Tech, noted that ONR was one of the groups helping to fund their work “looking at different components of simulation fidelity and display fidelity to determine how they impact training.”

“We look at the different components of ‘immersion,’ if you will, and see what is important to accomplish a particular task,” he explained. “One of the things we see [around I/ITSEC 2013] is more of a breakdown of components to see what is actually important or what actually affects the training outcome, rather than just the intuition that we need everything more real; we need everything with the highest field of view. For a particular task some of that may not necessarily matter and you may want to spend your resources in a particular direction.”

“I think our next few studies are going to be looking at the AITT, which is an augmented reality trainer for some forward observer work,” he added. “And we’re going to see what different components of augmented reality afford the soldiers who are going through the virtual training.”

Although technologies may change in the future, many science and technology representatives at I/ITSEC were quick to emphasize the critical importance and success of today’s military training systems.

“The bottom line here is that we are delivering cost effective training systems across the fleet and force using simulation based technologies, mixed reality systems and other things,” Allard said. “We’re not just providing high fidelity simulators. We’re really providing training systems that measure performance and that reflect real warfighter requirements and skill levels.”