 Technology is moving faster every day. Today's threat is always changing, and we need to stay ahead of it to protect ourselves. So how are we turning the soldiers of today into the soldiers of tomorrow, and ensuring that future soldiers will be an advanced, decisive weapon? Today's soldier is a vastly different creature than the soldier of the past. Besides being physically fit, we must be tactically and technologically proficient, able to make lightning fast critical decisions in high-stress situations. So how are we turning young, inexperienced soldiers into intricate fighting machines through the power of simulation and gaming technology? It's always going to come down to human performance. It's going to come down to soldiers and leadership and understanding what needs to be done, being able to act and do those things. But in order to do that, we need to be able to replicate those environments and challenge soldiers in training. We traveled across the Army to find out how the experts are using simulation and video game technology to train the force, to see what soldiers can expect from the future battlefield. Soldiers should be very excited about the future of training in the Army. There's a lot of cool technology that is coming available because we are looking at the games industry and we're looking at Hollywood and we're looking at other ways things are being done. The military has been using simulation and gaming technology for training, tactics analysis and mission preparation for centuries. So simulation is not a new thing. Any training that a soldier does that's not actual combat is a simulation of some sort. Even when we have them filled and they're doing live training, it's still simulated combat. What we're doing is incorporating more and more technology in order to make more of their available training time effective. This is important because it's going to be pretty difficult in the future operational environments, the things that we're asking soldiers to do and technology is going to be a key enabler. Oh, the future of gaming technology, there's so much potential and every year there's more. It's getting to the point where, well, in two years there's going to be things that we never would have imagined today. The Army is working to perfect that with a variety of new technology. At the Army Research Lab Orlando Simulation and Training Technology Center they developed a mixed reality where virtual elements like people, targets and ballistics are mapped into a soldier's live field of view. Moving behind objects rather than through them, this immersive virtual reality training is so profoundly real. A user feels fully present in their environment, making the adrenaline pump and their heart beat faster just like a real life mission. Over the years we've used pop-up targets, paper targets, that sort of thing. How much better would it be to be able to project an actual synthetic character in the environment that has the same look and feel of that entity? And it's much more realistic for the soldier and you have a better interaction there between the soldier and the target. Bam, got him. That capability provides invaluable training to our soldiers on the ground and even those across our oceans by giving us the power to enable users anywhere geographically to interact in complex virtual environments. We have so much to learn from each other and being able to sit in our home country and link to anybody anywhere in the world, it makes it so much easier to do coalition type exercises. These teamwork applications are also being used at places like the Mission Training Complex at Joint Base Lewis McCord, where simulators like the Striker Virtual Collective Trainer are adapting soldiers' team fighting tactics by creating an environment where soldiers can safely replicate expensive and dangerous scenarios. Can I drag this body and put it in the truck? This is a valuable thing for the soldiers to do. We all need to focus on making sure our soldiers are prepared for the missions that we're going to ask them to perform and getting many repetitions of a soldier's skill is the way to make them prepared. Gaming and virtual provide more simulations than in the live environment. That live environment is also changing due to virtual and gaming technology. As far back as the Roman Empire, sand tables were used representing soldiers in units in battle. Rocks and sticks. Today's technology is moving us out of the sandbox and into a full 3D replica with applications allowing us to custom tailor displays for each individual role a soldier will play, turning this to this. You just need to take pictures. Could you use existing drone systems that the military has? Absolutely. If you're able to take actual imagery and you're able to put the three-dimensionality to it, and be able to walk through that terrain and see all the angles and even see what the enemy might see from his position and if you can do it quickly, there's a lot of value in that. Simulations in gaming technology is revolutionizing the way we do business and it's forcing soldiers out of the box and into the virtual world. It teaches you to operate in a dynamic environment and do decision making. We try to make it as immersive as possible and then when you do have to make those decisions or use those systems in a more stressful environment you're better prepared. Training needs to be as hard as the game itself. Make the scrimmage as hard as the game so that soldiers are challenged and they see things for the first time in training not for the first time on the battlefield. Experience improves survivability but unfortunately that first negative experience could also be the death of them. So we want to have them have those negative experiences virtually so that when they are out in the real world they have this repertoire of I know this worked, I know this didn't work how can I apply it to the existing situation? As technology continues to change simulations and gaming technology will take on an even bigger role in our army ensuring America's future soldiers will become advanced decisive weapons. I think that very soon our simulation environment is going to be everywhere at all times and that's going to change the way we game change the way we learn the way we interact with one another everyone is probably somewhat afraid of that but there's also components of that that we can embrace and that we can make good use of for learning. Put your body in the back of the striker, okay? No man left behind here.