IT2EC NEWS: British Company Shows Cloud Ready for Virtual Training

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ROTTERDAM, Netherlands — Metaverse vendor Hadean has completed a pathfinder contract with the British army to demonstrate cloud distributed simulation technology for live, virtual and constructive training.

The British army’s Collective Training and Transformation Program is a 600-million-pound initiative to expand LVC training. Hadean’s contract sought to demonstrate the viability of cloud technology in complex training exercises.

“The overarching aims really were to validate the approach that harness the orchestration and distribution capabilities of a cloud platform, which is obviously central to what they're looking to deliver for a future collective training system,” Hadean’s head of defense Nick Brown said on the sidelines of IT2EC, one of Europe's biggest training and simulation conferences.

In March, Hadean brought the system to a training exercise in Kenya, which involved aggregating live, raw data from multiple sources and training systems and moving it into the cloud.

From there, the U.K.-based company managed and orchestrated the data and ran the synchronization of different types of data running at different refresh rates and protocols “into something that represented a common, trusted, single synthetic environment hub in the cloud, and then distribute that single source of truth from the exercise globally,” Brown said.

The live exercise involved a raid on a target with virtual fires and air support, he said.

“We were able to visualize close air support that was provided for the exercise, but of course, they can't see. But they can see the outcomes of those joint fires engagements,” he said.

“We were able to see the tactical deployment of the troops on the ground in 3D and in a way that certainly the analysts that are out there supporting the delivery of [the] after-action review were able to see the immediate benefit of in relation to seeing what the troops are actually doing tactically,” he continued.

A team on the ground in Kenya and British army headquarters in England monitored the downlink of exercise in real time, he added.

Key to the program is the ability to “orchestrate, manage and then distribute live data that's coming in multiple formats” in a central, scalable and interoperable could platform so the data can be shared live or collected to reuse, he said.

“And being able to learn lessons from it as well,” he continued, “and then exploit those lessons back into how training is delivered. And I think that's also where you come to the point where you can take a natural step from the upper ends of collective training into mission rehearsal and then into the operational domain.”

The first major contract that will be issued by the British army under the CTTP program will be the Strategic Training Partnership, informed in part by the results of Hadean’s demonstration, Brown noted.

One of the challenges going forward with live-virtual-constructive training for multi-domain operations will be getting the governance regime up to the level of current technology, he said.

“If we proved anything with the CTTP work is that the technological element of this might be ahead of the conceptual because I still think there are conceptual and governance layers that sit above the technical layer that need to be agreed upon, to enable all of those elements that represent the multi-domain environment,” he said.

“Making that a reality across different frontline commands and different services is perhaps slightly more in the political/governance domain,” he said.

Topics: Training and Simulation