Naval simulators designed for training while at sea.

The Navy's training systems division expects future growth in the demand for virtual-reality trainers, particularly deployable and embedded devices.

"There is more and more interest and acceptance in using simulation to train people. It is a trend that is not reversing," said Capt. Andy Mohler, head of the Naval Air Systems Command's Training Systems Division, in Orlando, Fla.

With a budget of about $550 million in 2003, the division expects a higher number in 2004, Mohler told National Defense.

As the Navy deploys more often in worldwide operations, he explained, Navair is expecting that the service will fine-tune its requirements for deployable trainers.

Deployability is a "wonderful freebie" that has evolved out of advanced technology, said Mohler. During the past three years, the capability to make trainers smaller and more capable has been "growing by orders of magnitude so things that ran on very large footprint machines, now fit into lap top computers," he said.

With the loss of the live-fire training range on Vieques Island, Mohler's office has been tasked by the Office of the Secretary of Defense's live fire office to prototype the use of modeling and simulation to replicate close air support and naval gunfire.

One of the most useful deployable trainers has been the Virtual At Sea Training system, or VAST, developed by the Office of Naval Research. It is used by gunners to score precisely where the ordnance rounds actually landed. During exercises, the operator fires at the simulation of what they might expect to see in combat, while the ordnance actually lands within an array of buoys in the water. Exercise evaluators, monitoring the target practice on a computer screen, could be either aboard a ship or somewhere ashore.

"They take the pack up kit and put some sonar buoys in the ocean that are instrumented," said Mohler. "That allows them to create a virtual range anywhere in the world, so they can practice naval gunfire."

Another valuable training aid is the Conning Officer Virtual Environment (COVE), for surface warfare officers. The technology is designed to train or refresh the commander's eye in tactically challenging scenarios. A portable COVE unit can be used in the schoolhouse and deployable onboard ships.

The virtual reality technology provides the visual cues used by ship-handlers to perceive distance and movement in a marine environment. Using a helmet-mounted display, the ship-handler is presented a full 360-degree field of view just like being on an actual ship.

By using COVE, instructors are able to inject failures, "all the things that you hope won't happen to you, but they do happen sometimes," he said.

The Navy has six systems at the Newport News surface warfare school and is going to add another six, he said. "Surface ships communities that I have talked to at least want to begin deploying those because they now fit in a suitcase and are pretty cheap to replicate," he added.

The Navy also recently sent out a deployable F/A-18 fighter trainer onboard the Kitty Hawk carrier, Mohler said.

One consideration when fielding deployable trainers is the ability to simulate ship movements at sea.

"When you have a side picture that is the ocean doing a certain thing and the real ocean that you are standing on is doing something else, you get cue-mismatch between your brain" and your eyesight, said Mohler.

"What your inner ear sees can cause you to become ill," he explained. "It happens to about 10 percent of the population. I have heard people say that with the right kind of cueing mismatch that they can make anybody simulator sick."

Scientists in Orlando "are studying it as a real and serious problem" and are trying to figure out how to visually cue the sailors, be it with the use of a full motion seat or an inflated G-suit.

"There is nothing that is going to stop the deployability of simulation and the embedding of simulation out on real platforms," Mohler said. "It is something that has to happen. I do not think it is a showstopper. We will tolerate some level of sickness."

Deployability also brings certain reliability issues, he said. Deployable trainers must be able to survive in corrosive salt-water environments and endure the electro-magnetic radiation that exists onboard ships.

"The highest electro-magnetic vulnerability in the world is on a flight deck of an aircraft carrier, because of the amount of radars and the density of those that are on board," Mohler said.

"We find that with communications devices we have to harden them in ways we never thought of. And you would not face [these issues] if you never deployed them."

For example, the augmented reality firefighting system "is supposed to be working. It worked well in a lab. It is semi-portable when you set up the head tracking and body tracking system," he said.

But the fleet wants the same capability down in places where they fight fires, like in an engine room, which is a complex three-dimensional space, Mohler said. "The body tracking and head tracking systems that we have right now do not work in that three-dimensional steel environment very well, with complex shapes all around it."

He said the Navy expects to develop firm requirements for deployable trainers within a year or two. "We have had the F-14A system and the D that had an embedded training device. That is a device over 30 years old."

Embedded Training

New systems now in development will have trainers already built into them, which will make training at sea much easier. The best examples of naval embedded trainers are in the Virginia-class submarine and the LPD 17 amphibious assault ship, which are now in development.

In the LPD 17, embedded training "is not just one system. It is a system of embedded subsystems that can simulate things like the gas turbine control panels so that they can train you to start the engines without firing up the ship and starting it," Mohler said.

"They are going to have classes of embedded subsystems training within the systems of the ship so that the ship can be cold iron except for power, and instead of having 10 guys manning the engineering space, we have one person that uses the trainer."

Mohler's office, additionally, has to make sure that the training systems are not developed in isolation of other services' simulations. His office specifies interface standards and coordinates with the other services to make sure that the Navy simulators are interoperable.

NAVAIR is advocating standards such as the Software Content Object Reusable Module, which defines how objects can be reused. For example, if the Navy comes up with a model that replicates a crew chief--both physically and cognitively--and the Air Force likes that model and wants to use it too, there needs to be a common standard that can be adjusted to the Air Force's needs.

"Today, what has to happen is that I am going to define [my crew chief] in certain parameters and ways through Navy standards and, therefore, the Air Force can't use that detailed model on which I might have spent hundreds of thousands dollars, because we do not have a joint standard to share that," said Mohler.

The Defense Department's Joint Simulation System was "going to do a lot of this work," he said. The program, however, is being canceled. (See related story) "That is where I think JSIMS, or a son of JSIMS, will have to come along, because the requirement is to do this type of sharing or to define a common operating environment."

Generally speaking, said Mohler, the key to effective trainers is a thorough analysis of what the users need.

"This is a trend of using good front-end analysis, using the cognitive research people to sit down with the end user and say, 'What is that you really want? How do you want it to perform?'" Mohler said.

"That is a lot different than what we do today, sometimes to our own discredit," he said. Often, trainer developers say, "We need 100 percent emulation of that airplane," when in fact a "part-task trainer" could do the job at a lower cost.

In his opinion, the process of using what he calls "the science of learning" is shaping up as a trend in Navy training program development. It is paramount, he said, to measure human performance in initial technology specifications and in the test and evaluation master plans.

"I also want to measure how easy it is for the sailor to use, how easy are the tools that you have given to maintain [the system], and how quickly and easily it can be repaired," he said.