The Military Metaverse

Author: Andy Fawkes and David Burden

Hardcover

This book explores the impact that the Metaverse is having today on how the world's militaries procure, maintain, train, plan and fight, and how the Metaverse presents new challenges and opportunities for future conflict. It should be of interest to militaries, the industries that support them, and the wider public.

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Summary

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The Military Metaverse explores the impact that the Metaverse is having today on how the world’s militaries procure, maintain, train, plan, and fight, and how the Metaverse presents new challenges and opportunities for future conflict.

The military were early adopters of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies and wider simulation systems. Before 2010 they were one of the few sectors that could afford the technology, and millions of military R&D dollars went into developing and understanding these technologies. However, as the democratisation of Metaverse technologies has happened over the past decade, there is a danger that militaries have been overtaken and caught short, encumbered with often costly legacy systems, sold and maintained by prime contractors, while the gaming and consumer market has cheaper and more innovative and agile systems. This book provides a history of the use of Metaverse technologies in the military, particularly in the areas of design, maintenance, training, planning, and operations. It then examines the current state of the art in these areas and the opportunities that are available from the current generation of consumer-driven approaches. The drivers for, challenges to, and paths towards an enterprise approach to the Military Metaverse are then presented. The book explores the military use of social virtual worlds, of early work done by defence and security organisations in worlds such as Second Life, and how such environments could become important for intelligence as well as influence operations in the future. Finally, the book will consider what war in the Metaverse might look like, in terms of both in-world activities and the impact of cyber-war on the Metaverse itself.

This book should be of interest to all militaries across the world, the industries that support them, and those in academia and the wider public with an interest in the military and defence.

About the Author

Andy Fawkes is an engineer, consultant, and speaker specialising for over 20 years in simulation and training, and related emerging technology trends. He is a Special Correspondent for Military Simulation & Training (MS&T) and authored the "Military Metaverse CONOPS" for the UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD). Formerly, he served as UK MoD Head of Simulation Policy and chaired NATO's Modelling and Simulation Group.

David Burden created his first virtual world in 1996 and has spent most of the time since working in virtual spaces and with virtual humans for a variety of clients through his company Daden Limited. His first presentation on the Metaverse was in 2008. David served as an officer in the British Army's Royal Corps of Signals during the 1980s, and had led over a two dozen research projects for UK MOD, many on metaverse topics.