ModelBlog: Innovation in Simulation

Military Simulation & Serious Games

2009-10-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

"The world inside a simulator is as real as the world inside your head – but it is more accurate."

Simulation has been a powerful tool for training the military for over 3000 years. What began as sand tables and board games has evolved into advanced computer and communication systems that encompass the globe and provide training portals on every continent. Commercial computer games have followed a similar evolutionary trajectory in delivering entertainment. The core technologies behind both fields have many commonalities and become more intertwined every year.

This book is a collection of essays on the technical, social, and economic importance of simulation and gaming techniques, tools, and technologies. It provides a fascinating historical summary, explores important technical capabilities, and speculates on the role that these technologies will play in the future.

http://www.modelbenders.com/milsimgame.html

Military getting help from showbiz

2009-10-13T06:32:00.001-07:00

Military getting help from showbiz

Posted using ShareThis

2009-09-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

Advice: written on the back of a business card

This book is filled with short words of advice from hundreds of successful professionals in industry, government, and academia. It emerged from one simple question posed to all of them.

“Imagine that you are about to give your business card to a young person entering your profession. But first, you turn that card over and write a short piece of advice to help them get started in their career. What would you write on the back of your own business card to help them?”

The advice is from the people who will hire you and for whom you will work. They are all very eager to share their most valuable ideas with new people entering their field. Each of these leaders remembers how clueless they were when they started in business. This is their way of helping you get started with the advice that they never received – but wished that they had.

"You can do anything ... but not everything." - Bill Waite

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." – Charles Darwin

http://www.modelbenders.com/advice.html

Game Technology in Medical Education

2009-08-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

This book proposes four hypotheses concerning the impact and acceptance of virtual reality, simulation, and computer game technologies in medical education. It focuses on laparoscopic surgery because of the similarities between that form of surgery and virtual reality systems. The evidence indicates that the following four hypotheses are supported by the medical research literature.

· Hypothesis 1: Surgical training can be accomplished at a lower cost using virtual reality and game technology-based tools than through existing methods of training.

· Hypothesis 2: Virtual reality and game technology-based training environments provide better access to representative patient symptoms and allow more repetitive practice than existing forms of training.

· Hypothesis 3: Virtual reality and game technology-based training environments can reduce the training time required to achieve proficiency in specific procedures.

· Hypothesis 4: Virtual reality and game technology-based training can reduce the number of medical errors caused by residents and surgeons learning to perform new procedures.

The strong evidence collected in this study indicates that game-based systems are becoming much more accepted in medical education and that the technical limitations that existed when these devices were first introduced are being overcome.

Web Page: http://www.modelbenders.com/medsim.html

Combat Medic Card Game

2009-07-30T11:27:00.001-07:00

Published: Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The U.S. Army is working with UCF to design a card game to help combat medics memorize life-saving techniques. “The research question is, ‘Can we effectively train and use some of the training downtime for combat medics to help reinforce some of the key life-saving processes that they need to know perfectly?’” said David Metcalf of IST, principle investigator for the project. “That’s the goal of what we’re doing.”

The U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, Simulation and Training Technology Center, (RDECOM-STTC), has teamed up with the UCF Institute of Simulation and Training on the project.

The object of the card game is to test medics’ and nurses’ knowledge of medical techniques that are used in the first hour of an injury or incident that are vital to saving lives. “These are process steps around what’s called the ‘golden hour’ where certain treatments can save people’s lives,” Metcalf said. “Things like obstructed airways or a hemorrhage that needs to be taken care of, or a chest wound, a collapsed lung or something like that.

“Those are some things that if you treat them well in the first hour using the right processes, you can save a life.” The game will quiz the medics on their knowledge of these processes and can be played individually or in groups.

“We’ve actually designed several card games, and we have a series of students and research associates at the Institute of Simulation and Training that are working in conjunction with Army RDECOM-STTC, some actual combat medics and combat nurses that are subject matter experts, and then some of the developers and designers who are helping us with the actual cards,” Metcalf said.

The team plans to have a sample deck ready by Aug. 10, Metcalf said.

They will begin conducting demonstrations and receiving feedback from Army personnel and combat medics. From there they hope to have a finished deck ready by October.
Some of the developers and designers include UCF students Denice Lancashire, an instructional technology graduate student, and Jorge Oyola, a digital media senior.

Lancashire is working to develop the game instructions and help with game testing.
While she’s not involved in the actual construction of the cards, she believes the best part of the project is watching everyone’s work come together to create a valuable final product.Oyola is working on the card designs, focusing on editing images for them and creating and retooling card templates.

At first, it wasn’t clear to Oyola how this project would benefit the combat medics.
“At the beginning of the project, I didn’t really see how combat medics or soldiers would really have any enjoyment for the game,” Oyola said. “I thought they might see it as sort of like a gimmick and not really pay much attention to it.

“But as I’ve seen the art evolve and the fact that there are multiple games that you can play with this, as well as use it as a standard deck of 52 cards with the four suites and everything, I really think that they’ll take home a lot from it.”

Metcalf is enthusiastic about the student participation in the project.

“They’ve been really valuable on the project too,” Metcalf said. “They’ve had some really good ideas.

“They’ve also been involved in play-testing out the games to make sure that the actual game-play works.”

They all agree that one of the highlights of the final game will be knowing it is working to save lives in the field.

“I think that helps a lot,” Oyola said, “knowing that we’re doing something that can save lives on the field as well as alleviate some of the boredom and some of the stress. I think it’s a really great feeling.”

Link: Central Florida Future - Card game reinforces medic training

Waiting for the Dot.Sim Boom

2009-05-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

Simulation has not had its dot.com boom. Our field has always grown in lockstep with a number of high technology areas. We have ridden right along with, and in some cases have driven, the leading edge of new technologies. As mainframe computers became workstations, and then PC’s, simulation products leveraged all of this equipment and became better for it. As computer graphics moved out of the university research labs, we were quick to adapt these new technologies to our flight and driving simulators. We moved from large cabinet-sized image generators, to smaller graphics boxes, to dedicated workstations, to internal graphics cards. As networking and the Internet became prolific we connected our simulators together, created standard networking protocols, and constructed distributed events across all of our facilities.

We have always been very hungry for advanced technologies because our customers constantly demand more capability, better performance, and lower costs. Working in the simulation and simulator business has always given engineers the opportunity to apply the newest technologies emerging from research labs and commercial vendors.

But all of a sudden this stopped. The commercial world discovered that the Internet allowed them to do business in an entirely different way. They were able to connect directly to millions of customers around the world without creating physical stores and without shipping special equipment to every customer. The Internet opened the door to delivering products and services to every single customer in the world. With it the Amazon.com website could sell more books than Barnes & Noble with its 800 physical stores. This was a huge change in the relationship between a vendor and its customers. I grew up in a small town in Southeast Colorado with very limited access to retail products and professional services. A big shopping center was the Sears Catalog store. It contained a refrigerator, a dishwasher, and a table full of catalogs. If you needed appliances, lawn equipment, tools, or clothes you shopped for them in the catalog and placed your order. There were only a couple of storefronts on Main Street and not a single bookstore. My bookstore was a single small shelf at the local drugstore. My Amazon.com was the mail-in form on the back pages of the books I purchased from the drugstore. Barnes & Noble could not reach out to me with its vast selection. I had to reach into the inventory through the soda straw listed on one page of a paperback book.

Amazon.com is not just a huge warehouse of books. It is a delivery system that can reach every single person in the networked world. It allows a child in a small town of 500 people to access the same books as a child in the heart of New York City. It breaks down the location-specific barriers that prevent people from learning and exploring on their own initiative. That is the real power of the dot.com boom. In the simulation community we have not created this kind of service for our customers.

Simulation systems are still delivered like heavy products to specialized facilities. We create destination sites in the pattern of Disney World that soldiers have to visit physically to experience. And like Disney World, such visits can be once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Our soldiers cannot travel to our high-end destinations every time they want to improve their performance or explore a new idea. A dot.com boom in simulation would extend our systems through the military Internet to every soldier’s desktop computer. It would allow every soldier to browse our offering of simulation services, enter the one of their choice, and join a team to explore a new idea or receive a lesson from a leader.

The technologies to do this are available now and pooling at our feet. But we continue to insist that training via simulation requires a dedicated facility, specialized equipment, and a large support staff. We insist that simulation cannot do a soldier any good unless it is custom crafted by an experienced professional and makes scant use of the newest technologies. To continue the Amazon.com analogy, we are insisting that books should only be sold in physical stores by a trained staff, and that an online bookstore would corrupt this process by allowing people to select their own books without explicit human guidance. This same argument was made against online education for years. Online universities were once considered the lowest form of crass commercialization of a much higher calling, not much above a diploma mill. But today, every university from Harvard to the local Community College offers some or all of their degree programs on the Internet.

The technical tools already exist to provide Internet-delivered, simulation-driven, training and exploration. What does not exist is the will to customize and extend our resources to reach every soldier in the service. We still want the soldiers to come to our specialized facilities and our dedicated staff. We are not ready to let soldiers take a hand in guiding their own training.

We currently have wargames that can be adapted to run on the server side of these training networks. We have computer games that can provide the intuitive client side interface. We have IT infrastructure tools that can tie the right soldiers to the right applications. New “Web 2.0” applications are opening the door to user created and modified content like our simulation scenario databases. These will allow a soldier to modify existing scenarios and select specific AAR products from within a standard browser. User interfaces like Google’s Earth and Map products can provide a window into a simulation running in the military computer cloud. Though DOD security regulations may make the use of such tools difficult, they do not make it impossible. What is really difficult is to get our community to see simulation as a service that can be extended to millions of soldiers, rather than as a device, a facility, or a destination experience.

Each time our industry grasps new technologies there is the fear that we might abandon the good work that is being done with the older methods. But these fears are never realized. There was a time when all training was Live. The emergence of board wargames provided tools to supplement and extend that live training, but not to replace it. The computer revolution brought us virtual flight and vehicle simulators, but these did not replace live training. Instead they allowed pilots and vehicle crews to experience situations that were impossible to create in the live world. Simulation as a Service will expand and extend the value of our products to the soldier in the same way that virtual and constructive systems have done in the past. Some tasks can be trained very effectively from a standard desktop computer. Other skills must remain in the live, virtual, or constructive systems that we already have.

A dot.com boom in simulation will do the same for the soldier that Amazon.com did for the reading children of small town America. It will make huge volumes of training material accessible to every soldier, everywhere, all the time.

History of Games: From Dice to Computers

2009-05-01T06:32:00.001-07:00

I have created a presentation on the History of Games. It was first presented at a defense simulation & gaming conference so has definite bias in that direction. But the long-term goal is to pull together a sahred resource that many people can use in education.

You will find the PowerPoint on SlideShare.net and are welcome to use it for your own non-commercial uses. If you make significant additions, please send them to me so I can incorporate them into the briefing for other people as well.

History of Games: From Dice to Computers

View more presentations from Roger Smityh.

Games vs. the Wizards of Grep

2009-02-12T08:59:00.000-08:00

Games are making a big splash in the military training world. They offer beautiful graphics, simplified user interfaces, and low cost to entry. But some people question whether they are really valuable simulations. They point to the lack of detail in some models and the singular focus on direct fire combat engagements. But that is the same way that a lot of simulation have entered the inventory. One of the earliest models, CARMONETTE, was introduced in 1953. The first version contained only tank-on-tank combat with a little anti-tank play. Each year new capabilities were added - infantry in version 2, helicopters in version 3, and communications in version 4.

Games are going to evolve like that as well. They are being introduced in their sweet spot. Once they are running well in that specialty, they will grow into other areas. We will discover how to apply them to situations that are unique to the military and that have not be perfected in the commercial entertainment space. Such perfection in the entertainment world requires 100's of millions of dollars and many years of trail-and-error product launches. They are not going to do all of that work for functions that draw in 10 or 100 customers.

Remember when all computers were used from the command line? We all learned cryptic commands like ls, grep, chdir, chpwd, and hundreds more. With these and their endless list of arguments we could invoke thousands of different actions on the computer. But then we were presented with X-Windows, the Mac interface, and Windows. These hid the magic commands and allowed anyone to hunt-and-peck their way through a set of menus to invoke the same actions. The Wizards of Grep all proclaimed, "too slow", "for amateurs", "not flexible", "can't really see what is happening". But these interfaces opened the door to millions of new users of computers. They allowed people to use the machines without becoming wizards and they eliminated a lot of the tragic mistakes that even experts made. (Remember your first accidental "rm -rf" command? ...oops...) This led to computers as artistic devices, multi-media machines, and replacements for all office equipment.

Games will do for simulation, what windows and Windows have done for desktop computing. They are also undeniable and unstoppable.

Games vs. Virtual Worlds for Nation-sized Problems

2009-01-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

3D Shooters are the most prominent form of game system and environment in the consumer and the defense space. These portray conflict, combat, and deadly threats. They immediately plunge the player into a simulating environment with urgent problems to solve. They also mirror some of the most important engagements that real people and real societies engage in. However, these environments are extremely limited in time and space. The battlefield is a relatively small area – usually just large enough to contain a specific vignette, and never so large that the players can wander far enough to miss the entire point of that piece of the world. These vignettes and geospaces are linked together in such a way that the player can move immediately from one “hot spot” to the next. There is no room in these for intervening relationship building, downtime learning, AAR, or planning for the next engagement. For entertainment this hot-spot-hopping is exactly what you want. But as a venue for wrestling with real problems, this is a very small and single-focused experience.

MMOGs create a much larger space in which player spend more time wandering, conversing, building relationships, and joining clans that will participate in specific battles. It includes spaces for combat, socialization, trade, and exploration. This size and diversity enables a much broader and somewhat richer experience of the world and the other players in it. Specific battles may still be the focus for many players, but they can also plan, rehearse, and regale in stories surrounding these as well. The algorithms that determine engagement outcomes, but battle and trade, are simple – often just subtracting and adding points to a player’s health.

Virtual Worlds create an world that can be smooth and continuous like the real world. They can create context, connections, and history that is similar to what exists in the real world. But in their current state they are only slightly different from MMOGs. Second Life, and others like it, are unique in that the content is created by the users, not by the development company. This begins to allow the users to shape the world to meet their needs. But to really become distinct and useful, these spaces need to allow the users to upload/link their own models into the world. The VW needs to provide an infrastructure that can accommodate heterogeneous models provided by users and allow these diverse models to interact with each other. Business and Government problems cannot be represented by generic one-size-fits-all models provided by an entertainment company.

Each game designs a set of models that meet the needs of that game. The preference is to create sparse models that are computationally inexpensive and that fit together to allow interactions across all of the objects in a space. As virtual worlds are adopted to the needs of real government and intelligence customers, there is going to be a need to (1) add much more complex models that require more computational power, (2) bring together a very diverse set of models that were not originally meant to work together. A government Virtual World cannot align these models one at a time, that is an N-squared problem that will very quickly become impossible to manage. There needs to be an infrastructure that allows heterogeneous models to be integrated into the world and to work with the existing models without requiring customer model-to-model modifications. This would be a big environment with an underlying software infrastructure that present real value to the government.

For the complete briefing see: http://www.peostri.army.mil/CTO

2008 Defense GameTech Conference

2008-11-26T09:21:00.000-08:00

The agenda and presentations for the 2008 Defense GameTech Conference are posted on the web at:
http://www.peostri.army.mil/PAO/pressrelease/20080425_gametech.jsp

[Note: This is a belated posting. Google does not seem to have indexed the link above.]

The 3D Cellphone

2008-09-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

Big computer companies like IBM and HP are developing software that allows you do view highly detailed 3D worlds on modest client machines (see DCV and RGS links below). This is accomplished by doing the rendering on the server side and sending the screen to a number of smaller clients.

Companies like Vollee and OTOY are doing something similar, but targeted at the cellphone. Imagine that you are running a 3D world like Second Life on your cellphone. But, since your phone does not have the compute or storage resources to really do this, all of the rendering is being done on a server and the results streamed to your phone in the form of a digital movie (MP3, Flash video, etc.). Your inputs on the phone are commands to move through the virtual world and interact with the objects there. These commands are carried to a server where the simulation and graphic rendering are done and the finished video frames are streamed back to your phone for you to see. Clearly there will be some video lag between the command and the visual results as the key entries travel to the server, are simulated and rendered, and the results travel back to your phone. if you are old enough you will remember that this is how text entry and order execution worked with the old terminal windows back when "the Internet" meant textual applications on a command line and there was no such thing as "the Web". You may also have seen the gradual evolution of that primitive interface into rudimentary graphic menues as clever people showed that the text could acrually drive a menu system rather than just showing up on a command line.

High-def rendering on all devices will become a reality. A few years ago we thought it would happen through the miniaturization of the GPU so that all phones had an Nvidia or ATI chip in them. But faster networks are making this possible while the GPU remains on the server machine. The connection between the client and server is fast enough that the two seem to share the visualization capability. There may be several technical hurdles to work through, but the community have solved bigger problems than those to get where we are now. Keep looking for great things on small devices.

IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/visualization/
HP: http://h20331.www2.hp.com/hpsub/cache/286504-0-0-225-121.html
Vollee: http://www.vollee.com/secondlife
OTOY: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/20/the-truth-behind-liveplaces-photo-realistic-3d-world-and-otoys-rendering-engine/

Virtual tea parties on the ceiling

2008-08-31T13:21:00.001-07:00

Why do we have chairs in our offices, classrooms, and public spaces? Are they a real necessity? Somewhere in the distant past people recognized the advantage of doing certain types of work mounted on a platform up off of the ground. They also found the need to keep nice clothes off of the ground and out of the dirt. Then there is the comfort factor for sitting down rather than standing up. In the physical world, chairs have become a staple of our existence.

When we enter the virtual world, what is a chair good for? There is no dirt, there is no physical fatigue, and characters can often float anywhere? So what use is there for chairs?

But if you navigate through Second Life you will find chairs, desks, lamps, and all of the typical artifacts of the the real world. All of them useless. We are so excited about the possibilities that can be achieved in the virtual world. But once inside it appears that most people cannot imagine anything different from what they have in the physical world. In fact, it looks like the virtual world is just a place where we can possess something that resembles what we cannot get in the physical world. If, in the physical world, you have a small office or cubicle, the first thing you might build in the VW is a bigger office. One bigger than the boss'.

Where is the imagination? It appears that most VW residents have little and most large organizations that enter the VW have absolutely none. Even though people complain that sitting in conference rooms and classrooms all day long is the most boring part of their lives, that is the first thing we offer them when they enter the virtual world.

Given an empty virtual canvas we create images directly from the physical world. We create load-bearing columns for buildings that weigh nothing. We hang light fixtures from virtual chains even though there is no gravity to pull them down. We put all of the furniture on the "floor" and leave the walls and ceiling of buildings empty. Where are the tea parties on the ceiling?

Second Life has many very clever and imaginative residents. But for some reason the islands of large organizations are just as sterile, standard, and unimaginative as the real offices. The "rules of the office" carry into the virtual world, even the rules that call for chairs that serve no purpose.

Pancake People

2008-07-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

Historically each individual has had the opportunity to become very deep in a very narrow part of existence. The farmer on an isolated piece of land in the Great Plains spent his entire life learning the fine details about the weather, soil, wildlife, growing patterns, and planting strategies that worked at a particular point of latitude and longitude. His education began as a boy between the ages of 5 and 8 years-old. If he chose to stay on the farm and carry on the family business, his experience and understanding of that point in time and space would continue until he was between 55 and 65 years-old. This type of life allowed him to become an expert with fifty or sixty years of expertise in a very specific domain of industry, geography, and time. He had the opportunity to socialize with other farmers around him and to learn from their experience as well. Like a scientist who spends all of his time in personal experimentation and works only with a tight-knit group of kindred souls, this farmer was able to master one specific domain through hard work and endurance.

Similar pockets of focused expertise existed all across the country and the world. They were characteristic of the “up by your own bootstraps” determination that was required to survive and succeed in such isolated conditions and with so little access to outside information. But as mediums for communication spread and became more accessible, the farmer was able to learn about the ideas of others around the state, the country, and the world. He began to rely on the expertise and discoveries of people far from his point in space, people he had never seen, met, nor imagined. He did not have to understand how their ideas worked. He just had to know enough to implement them effectively. Knowledge came to him embedded in new kinds of seeds, new equipment, and new farming practices that he had not created himself. He began to explore beyond his own experience of nature, work, and society. He was once an intellectual pillar standing on a particular point in space and time. He was tall, certain of his knowledge, and master to his place in the world. But the distribution of new products and the communication of new information allowed him to expand out and become more knowledgeable of the world. He was able to learn about and experiment with ideas beyond those tied to survival. He could take on hobbies and indulge his interest in machinery beyond farming. The farmer was becoming more broad and well-rounded. He was flattening out to cover more area and to rely on the expertise of others to perform his core function.

This picture of the lone farmer working to survive is similar to what has happened in all parts of society. The television and the Internet have played an important and unstoppable role in the flattening and broadening process. Since the 1950’s, society has broadened its exposure to information and thinned its specialization on one specific topic - especially concerning topics that are directly aligned with their professional and economic survival. We have created pancake people who know a little bit about everything in the world, but not a great deal about any one thing. Some individuals and groups remained dedicated to mastering their specialty. Professionals in law, medicine, engineering, philosophy, history, literature, and similar disciplines still prided themselves on their depth of thinking and their understanding of the great writings in their fields. However, the recent explosion of the World Wide Web has begun to link, summarize, critique, and repeat all knowledge. Even the islands of experts have found themselves seduced by the easy assess to vast stores of information. Even they have become information surfers. Though they may have criticized the masses of television channel surfers, they have succumbed to the same fate. The seduction of surfing across all information in any field, the ability to quickly locate and scan anything that has been written, these opportunities are too tempting to resist. But as we navigate these vast tracts of information we are just beginning to notice that the depth of our absorption, understanding, and incorporation of that information into our own ideas is becoming shallow. The intellectual classes of society are being broadened and flattened by the Internet in the same way that the television flattened the general public. Pancake intellectuals are joining the ranks of the pancake society.

From an intellectual perspective, the ability to think deeply about a subject may be attributed to the creation of the book. This abstract representation of knowledge could be patiently and painstakingly created by an author. It could be shared with millions of readers, who could spend their time working through it. Prior to its invention there was no means to collect, record, and disseminate large volumes of thought. The Internet is changing the era of the book into the era of the page. It is returning society to a time when all knowledge was limited to the size of a single piece of paper. It appears that we are not veering into a new type of information exchange, but are returning to a previous pattern.

Are we better off as pancake people?

Certainly exposing someone to a broad set of information in their early years is an advantage. It allows them to consider many options for directing their life. It opens doors that were previously closed or unimagined. But, is the shallow surfing of information the best way to conduct one’s life indefinitely? It is an effective means of discovering a new field, but not of mastering it. Sergey Brin argues that people are better off if they have access to all of the world’s information. That is certainly true. But it does not speak to the question of how a person should use that access. Being able to read the entire encyclopedia of human knowledge is a way to see the surface of a very large world. But it is not an effective method for becoming a master of any one part of that world. The expert must focus his attention on one small area for a significant amount of time. But, Nicholas Carr wonders whether it is possible to develop a mind which can both surf broadly and penetrate deeply into information. His own experience has been that broad surfing has weakened his ability to penetrate deeply. It appears to be a choice that each person must make – the wide flat pancake of familiarity, or the deep-rooted pillar of expertise.

It is encouraging that authors like Carr have the ability to see the transformation that is happening and to express it in a compelling manner that draws attention. Carr says, “I am not thinking the way I used to think.” But it is excellent that he is able to recognize that the change is happening. It is important that we in society recognize that we must choose between the pancake and the pillar of knowledge.

Ref: Carr, N. (July/August 2008). Is Google making us stupid? The Atlantic.com. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Wired Danger Room - Virtual Worlds for Military Training

2008-07-29T14:01:00.001-07:00

Today the Wired Danger Room Blog carried a summary of some ideas that I have been promoting on the use of virtual worlds for military training. The idea of a game on a soldier's desktop is old hat. The idea of a military virtual world that soldiers can access is relatively current. But the idea of the military creating a training service that allows any soldier or unit anywhere to access hundreds of different types of training systems and content - now that is a very big new idea. The Wired blog just begins to introduce that idea.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

2008-07-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Carr created a firestorm around the value of IT in 2003 when he wrote the article “IT Doesn’t Matter” for the Harvard Business Review. He has a new article in The Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Google and similar tools allow us access to a lot more information than any other generation has ever had. However, the style of the information and the mental behaviors that we use to access and absorb it are very different from the way previous generations absorbed books and detailed articles. Carr suggests that are becoming accustomed to all information being delivered as small bites that can be consumed in a few minutes. As a result we are losing the mental habit and facility to sit with a long treatise on a subject and work through it over many hours or many days. He reaches back to historical examples that have had similar effects on people’s behaviors. In summary he proposes that the tools that we use to create and deliver information shape the way our brains work and that the Web fails to create the mental muscles required to deeply investigate a subject.

Web 2.0 and Mashups for Military Information

2008-07-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

There is a very interested research paper from MITRE on the use of Web 2.0 tools and mashups for military applications. Web 2.0 usually refers to tools that allow you to collaborate with others online. Mashups are the combinations of services provided by different providers. There are a number of Google Map mashups in which people use Google’s map as the background reference for their own databases. The paper from MITRE describes tools from Yahoo, Kapow, and Google that can be used to process information. It contains an example of hunting through Flickr photos for a picture of a white van that was at a specific location at a specific time. This application ties together Yahoo Pipes with the Flickr photos database. The author goes on to describe the importance of ad hoc information processing to get inside your opponent’s OODA loop.

Ref: “Mashup the OODA Loop”, Jeffery Heier, MITRE C2C Center, New Jersey

Military Compute Cloud

2008-07-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

Amazon Web Services offers computing, storage, and network resources for sale by compute-hour or MB of storage. There are a number of new dot.com companies built on top of these services. The companies do not buy their own hardware, but instead rent only as much as is needed from Amazon, adding or subtracting every week as necessary. DISA has picked up this idea and created a similar service for use by military organizations. For example, STRI could host our applications on their machines and test them (hopefully across the “.mil” domain) – or leave them active as permanent services. The cost of the service is $500/month for unlimited resources. Long-term, DISA sees this as a means of becoming the permanent hosting service for many applications.

NextGov article

Web 2.0 for Simulation

2008-06-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 is a term often invoked to describe social networks, blogs, wikis, and similar tools that allow ad hoc groups to form around topics of interest. These tools are just beginning to be considered as business IT applications. In a military simulation domain, they could become the tools with which exercises are planned and the data from simulations is collected.I believe some of these will emerge at the next IT tool equivalent to email and the web browser. I cannot be certain which application is will be but I would put my money on the Wiki for real business and military operations.

Business Week Article

Web 2.0 for Warfigher Training

Virtual Surgery

2008-06-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

Dr. Richard Satava, US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, believes that a realistic future improvement in surgery is “virtual surgery”. His definition of this term is a surgical process that involves the following steps:

Patient is scanned with MRI to create an accurate digital model of their body and internal organs.
The surgeon operates on this virtual model until he/she arrives at a perfect procedure that is best for this patient. The surgery procedures can be edited just as you would edit a Word document until you remove all errors.
Upload the surgery to a robot that can follow the surgery file exactly. This is similar to a manufacturing robot which can cut metal parts more accurately than a human.
Let the robot perform the surgery under the observation of a surgeon who can override if necessary.

Future of the Internet

2008-05-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

Many people see the Internet and the applications that leverage it maturing into a system and a service similar to electricity, television, or the telephone network. They present this as a good and natural change which will make the system more ubiquitous, reliable, and predictable. However, Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard University is worried about this change. He points out that the power of the Internet has come from its openness and the ability of any person or company to create a product or service that takes it in a new direction. He argues that really innovative, valuable, and powerful products come from strange and unpredictable corners. What centralized approval board would have given the green light to projects like Facebook, Flickr, Second life, and Digg? These are the 21st century equivalents of the Web Browser, VRML, and Google search of the 20th century. Most established users of the network do not see real value in these new applications. But their value comes from the fact that they appeal to people who are not interested in what the Internet did for their parents, but are looking for something entirely different – preferably something that their parents “don’t get” or better yet, something their parents “don’t approve of”. A standardized, stable, commodity product stops growing and changing. There was very little innovation in the telephone network while AT&T held a monopoly on it. In fact, AT&T litigated against a number of innovators who dared to create a product that connected to their telephone system. Zittrain fears that the era of innovation, anarchy, and reinvention on the Internet is coming to a close. He is in favor of a “generative system” that is unruly and always changing itself rather than a platform that must maintain its reliability so that “the big boys” can reliably run their businesses on it.

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Johnathan Zittrain.

Lead User Innovation

2008-05-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

In most industries, R&D is done by a specific in-house department. However, for many products there is a leading edge group of users who buy the product and immediately make modifications to meet their very unique needs. Eric von Hippel (2005) of the MIT Sloan School of Management has studied the impact of "lead users" on the development of new features for products. He describes this effect in windsurfing, mountain biking, and open source software. These customers are effectively an external R&D lab for the company’s products. von Hippel argues that they need to be enrolled by the company as partners in identifying and developing features for the next generation of products. Three criteria must exist for this to be effective: (1) the users must have an incentive to innovate, (2) they must have an incentive to reveal their innovations and share them, and (3) their work must be at a competitive level with innovations created internally and by competing companies.

von Hippel’s book Democratizing Innovation is available as a free download on his web site: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

Free Computers with Every Electricity Contract

2008-04-25T09:33:00.001-07:00

Johnathan Swartz, CEO of Sun, was just speaking at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. He reiterated the fact that electric power costs more than computer hardware. Electricity is second only to staffing in many business costs.

A power company could offer a free data center to a company that would sign a multi-year contract to buy power. Note also that Chris Anderson's next big idea is offering free products (his last big idea was The Long Tail).

Self-destructing Email and Instant Messages.

2008-04-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

A small company at Web 2.0 offers a product that allows people to send email and instant messages that disappear over time. Initially this seemed like a very tricky feat. But after getting into the details, I learned that their system just sends an email or IM which contains a link to the content on their web server. When you read the message it is really loading from the server. At the specified time-out they just delete the message from the server and the link that exists in your email or IM client can no longer access the content of the message. This simple idea could be very useful and could be implemented by any web-based email service (e.g. Yahoo, Gmail). Though it is a good idea it is not a likely business success because it is too easily copied by any company.

Four Approaches to Simulation as an IT Service

2008-04-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

Previously I have described an idea to deliver simulations as an IT service in the same way that people are able to use the Web, email, and other online services. Further investigation and discussions with companies pursuing similar projects suggest that there are four methods of achieving this. Each has their own advantages and drawbacks.

Basic HTML. If a simulation can be delivered as basic HTML, then the infrastructure and desktop software is already in place to deliver this. Currently, Google Maps is an example of how far this can be taken with user interactivity.
Plug-in. We could develop a browser plug-in so that the main interface to simulation tools and content is still through the browser, but it would allow us to create more advanced content. The most popular plug-in of this type is Flash. Garage Games has developed a plug-in that uses DirectX and the power of the graphics card on the machine. This service is currently in Beta test at InstantAction.com.
Simulation Framework or Driver. A framework driver is a program that is approved to reside on a standard Army desktop and contains generalized rendering, AI, a GUI, and other tools that can be installed to support specific simulation content modules. The specific content (flight ops, team tactics, etc.) would be downloaded by the driver according to the needs of the soldier that was using a specific machine. The content modules would not be installed as unique programs but would be libraries to an already installed and approved driver.
Full Simulation. Finally, each computer user would have to download and install a full application that is specific to their needs. This is the most problematic in terms of server support, bandwidth, and user permissions.

20th vs. 21st Century Simulation

2008-03-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

We have reached the 21st century. How are military or interactive simulations different in this century than in previous centuries? Are we just going to run them faster than we have in the past? Or are we going to leverage 3D graphics, global networking, gigantic compute and storage servers, ad hoc social networks, the remote sensing explosion, and other technologies to create a fundamentally new product and service? Given the huge changes in computing and communications that have occurred, it would seem criminal to continue creating simulations in the same forms that we have been using for decades.