Blending military, multimedia and storytelling expertise, USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies dreams up a virtual-reality drill for the New World Order.

Eagle 6 is the tactical operations center. Eagle 1-6 is a platoon at a nearby storage depot where a group of weapons inspectors are at work. The lieutenant is in charge of another platoon, Eagle 2-6, being sent to reinforce the depot; he is heading to a rendezvous point to meet with his troops.
“Estimated ETA at your location, two-zero minutes. Over,” responds the lieutenant. Suddenly his vehicle lurches to a stop. Up ahead, at the rendezvous point, the lieutenant sees that another humvee under his command has collided with a civilian car, seriously injuring a young passenger. A soldier, the driver in the accident, is also slightly injured. The injured boy’s mother – a combustible mixture of fear, anger and hope – bends over her child. She speaks to him softly in Serbian.
“Driver’s got a cracked rib, but the kid is…” The medic hesitates, glancing at the mother. “Sir, we gotta get a medevac in here ASAP.”
Sullen onlookers are gathering even as the lieutenant calls for the medevac helicopter. A TV news cameraman appears and begins videotaping. Then a helicopter roars low overhead, heading for a landing zone farther up the street. In the distance, a rocket propelled grenade explodes. There’s a flurry of small-arms fire.
Is the accident scene secure? The crowd is growing bigger and more restless. What about the landing zone for the helicopter? A frantic radio call from Eagle 1-6 reports that they are now taking fire. Gunshots are heard over the radio. When the lieutenant orders the platoon sergeant to dispatch a squad to secure its route to Eagle 1-6, the mother explodes. Why are the soldiers abandoning her son?

in this scene is the lieutenant. Immersed in 3,500 thundering watts of 10.2-channel surround-sound, enveloped by a 150-degree wraparound screen, he (or she) is undergoing a training session designed to test decision-making under stress. Everything else is a computer-generated virtual reality tour de force created by a team of seasoned Hollywood storytellers and academic researchers from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. “Mission Rehearsal” (the code name for this novel Army training program) is the product of six months of imaginative multidisciplinary collaboration at USC.
The simulation plays out in a special theater outfitted with three projectors, sophisticated animation, voice synthesis and voice-recognition technology that make the experience “so realistic and directional that it can trick the listener into believing that a sound’s source is coming from anywhere in the room,” according to a June 2001 New York Times article on the project. The agents/ characters look, move and speak like real people. You feel like you’re there – hearing the creaks, bumps and rattles of the humvee. When the Blackhawk helicopter roars overhead, you're inclined to duck. Two sub-woofer channels pump out low-frequency sounds to induce emotional responses.
The Pentagon has long used computers to simulate realistic virtual battlefield experiences. What makes Mission Rehearsal extraordinary is that it models not tactical moves or effective use of firepower but human behavior and the emotions driving it.

The medic kneels by the injured boy, a medevac hovers overhead, the sergeant awaits orders. You're the lieutenant. What next? Image courtesy of ICT

“This is the kind of scenario that the post-Cold War military increasingly faces in nation-building missions,” says ICT director of technology Bill Swartout, a USC research associate professor of computer science and the project leader of Mission Rehearsal. “These are the kinds of decisions that young Army lieutenants must learn to make quickly.”
The U.S. Army created ICT two years ago with a $45 million grant. In addition to its own staff, the institute uses researchers from the USC School of Engineering, the USC School of Cinema-Television and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Computer-science expertise is drawn from the Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based USC Information Sciences Institute and the engineering school’s Integrated Media Systems Center. Beyond the academics, the team comprises Hollywood creative talent and experts from companies such as interactive-software developer Haptek Corp. and human-simulation software developer Boston Dynamics Inc.
“The Army acknowledged from the start that it would be an out-of-the-box project,” says ICT executive director Richard Lindheim. “There’s no other place in the world where Hollywood directors are working with computer scientists and colonels, not to mention [university-based] communications experts and cinema-television scholars.”

But the idea makes perfect sense. Training is hugely important for the Army and also hugely expensive. Force-on-force exercises in the field involve thousands of troops and all of their equipment. The Army and other branches of the military have developed many good tank and aircraft simulators that allow groups of soldiers to practice battle tactics against one another. These simulators don't completely replace driving tanks or flying airplanes, but they reduce the amount of real driving and flying time required for training.
Mission Rehearsal is a decision simulator. It’s where the next generation of young Army leaders will practice making decisions in the field. It’s where they’ll confront civilians from other cultures. And when they make a mistake, no one gets hurt.

Photographed by David Strick

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