Marine Corps Warfighting Lab turns virtual training into real event 

Marines will be outfitted with an array of sensors and will move through the high school-turned hostile area. And danger lurks. Marines’ movement outside and in the high school will be tracked as they execute their training missions. Their progress will also be displayed in real-time in a virtual world created by the lab and industry partners. Upon completion of a training mission, that same visualization can be played, paused and viewed from any angle for debriefs and after-action reviews. The questions regarding who did what to whom will no longer be a matter of “he said, she said.”   

Sensors include helmet-mounted video cameras and man-worn range-finding radios and inertial measurement units. Each system determines the location, orientation and pose of the Marine based on those worn sensors without the traditional infrastructure, such as fixed cameras, radio frequency IDs, or other  mounted equipment, currently required to track individuals through a training space. The ranging radios also allow them to be tracked through smoke and other obscuration The high-resolution tracking provided by this system is an enabling technology towards using augmented reality for training – a long-term goal for the Warfighting Lab. With augmented reality, avatars and other virtual players and effects will be injected into the Marines’ training scenarios, increasing their variability and complexity. 

Unusual, forward-thinking experiments are typical of the Marine Corps’ only warfighting laboratory. Such experiments may define the future of Marine Corps training. They are affordable and mobile. They can be used in the joint arena or internationally with foreign nations. They can be updated as needed.