Much of the U.S. military's
younger generation has grown up playing video games that constantly tell
players how well they're doing on the virtual battlefield — whether it's the
screen turning red to warn of low health or displays showing the world's
top-scoring players based on reviving fallen friends and killing enemies with certain
weapons. A U.S. Army weapons
engineer thinks that, with the right technologies, such gaming-world
awareness could become real for tomorrow's soldiers.
U.S.
soldiers could go into battle wearing "Google Glasses"
that warn of exhaustion levels by changing their vision's tint from green
("optimal") to yellow or red ("danger"), said David Musgrave, a
manager at the U.S. Army's Armament Research, Development and Engineering
Center at the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. Tank commanders and helicopter
pilots might see a kill ratio for how many enemy vehicles they've destroyed
compared to the rest of their unit, or even to the entire Army.
"The
same energy and pride that goes into climbing the rankings of 'Call of Duty'
multiplayer could be turned towards higher soldier performance, whether
that entails killing tanks, delivering fuel or saving lives," Musgrave
said.
That idea
remains decades away from implementation, even if U.S. Army commanders decide to
support it. But Musgrave hopes to achieve the more practical plan of tracking
weapons performance and soldier behaviors — a first step toward providing the
real-time awareness that could eventually motivate soldiers the way games
motivate players.
From games to war
Weapon
malfunctions on the battlefield can make a life-or-death difference to the U.S.
military. Yet Musgrave and his colleagues must rely on written reports and
anecdotes from soldiers who may struggle to recall all the important details of
when, where and how a weapon system failed or performed incorrectly.
"Ideally,
I'd be able to go to some central database and pull up all the recent failures
of that [weapon's] part and relevant history," Musgrave told
TechNewsDaily. "Unfortunately, right now, at best we can get someone who
used the system to try to vaguely remember if he'd seen the error before."
A
frustrated Musgrave found inspiration in his video game hobby. He was watching
a weekly Web series called
ExtraCredits when the
show discussed how game companies tracked the behavior of players inside
virtual worlds. Intrigued, he began running Google searches and discovered a
presentation from Bioware, the maker of popular games, such as the "Mass
Effect" trilogy, with statistics about how many players chose certain
actions. [Virtual Behavior Labs
Discover What Gamers Want]
Musgrave
began imagining the possibility of automatically gathering such data in real life.
He envisioned hundreds of self-propelled howitzers, huge cannons mounted on
tank-like tracks, reporting back their status, history and performance from
around the world. (Musgrave is project lead for fire-control software
development on the M109 Paladin, the U.S. Army's latest 155 mm howitzer).
Numbers game
Self-reporting
weapons could help engineers troubleshoot hardware or software problems, even
if the malfunctions only happen half a dozen times over a weapon program's
lifespan. That's because Army engineers could sort through the data pile,
looking at factors like time or temperature, to find what factors might be
related to the problem.
"Taken
on a case-by-case basis, a root cause may be impossible to find," Musgrave
explained. "But if we can pull a lot of data together, we may be able to
find trends in the chaos."
An even
more futuristic system could give the U.S. Army statistics that gamers already
expect from their online, multiplayer sessions, such as average hit rates or
the time required to engage enemy targets with a certain weapon. If the
tracking extends to soldier behavior, it could even identify what Army units
might need more training on a specific weapon.
Such
weapons-performance tracking might even inspire innovations in battlefield tactics
or weapons design.
"For
instance, let's say our shoulder-fired missile has a great thermal scope with
high-power zoom," Musgrave said. "Then, let's say we notice that
soldiers sometimes turn it on and use the optics as a spotting or recon device
instead of just finding a target for a missile. This would be a great new way
to use the system and something that the original designers might not have
considered."
Battlefield gamification
Still,
tracking weapons performance and soldier behavior in the real world presents a
much more difficult challenge than tracking virtual actions in a video game.
Musgrave wants to avoid loading soldiers down with more hardware or the need to
learn new procedures; so, his ideal starter system would piggyback on existing Army weapons software and focus on collecting just a few data
points.
The Army
may eventually have a "tactical Internet" connecting all its soldiers
and vehicles, a system that could report statistics in real-time and provide
the foundation for the "gamification" of the battlefield. Yet the
technology already exists to make a primitive data-reporting system a reality
within a decade, Musgrave said.
"Maybe
we won't have the live feedback that BioWare gets on who's playing 'Mass
Effect,' but the
Army could have something very useful in a very short amount of time,"
Musgrave said. "If we can keep the idea simple, affordable and
non-intrusive, I think this could actually happen."
This story was provided by TechNewsDaily,
a sister site to LiveScience. You can follow TechNewsDaily Senior
Writer Jeremy Hsu on Twitter @jeremyhsu. Follow TechNewsDaily on Twitter @TechNewsDaily, or on Facebook.
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2012 LiveScience, a
TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be
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