Virtual Reality Discussion Group

Last week Defence iQ had the priviledge of sitting down to discuss the military applications of virtual reality with a group of experts drawn from across industry, academia and military.

Joining me for the discussion, which was moderated by Randy Brown, Vice President & Virtual Heroes division manager, ARA, we had:

• Dean Hoover, Systems Engineering Section Manager, Virtual Systems, Raytheon Intelligence & Space
• Tim Marler, Senior Research Engineer, RAND Corporation
• Lt Col Arnel David, Cofounder, UK Fight Club
• Albert "Skip" Rizzo, Ph.D., Research Director, USC Institute for Creative Technologies for Medical Virtual Reality
• Paddy Little, Technical Director, Cervus Defence and Security
• Conor McKenna, CEO & Founder, Vocavio Group

To make the discussion more immersive we held the meeting inside one of our virtual reality environments. The hour-long discussion can be viewed here:

Our discussion was wide-ranging across military applications for virtual reality from treating PTSD to deployed operations and Training. We covered both the VR technologies themselves as well as the analysis that can be applied to the data it generates. This led us to also discuss ethical dimensions such as what happens to that data once it has been used to enhance the training event, does it follow the soldier around their entire career? Would systems designed to help the solider become sinister tools for performance appraisal.

I hope you find it an interesting watch!