Inside the £2m military metaverse dedicated to training future soldiers

Digital simulation is an increasingly attractive alternative to live military exercises

pilot in a flight simulator
Seven tech startups have pooled their technical expertise to make Project Odyssey operational Credit: Jon Super for The Daily Telegraph

The tactical controller looked up the valley, watching the trees sway in the winter breeze. A small dark speck, silhouetted against the sky, rapidly grew to full size.

A Eurofighter Typhoon flashed overhead with a roar, scattering a crowd of curious civilians who had gathered around a crashed Apache attack helicopter.

"Show of force complete," radioed the controller. Two feet to his right, the jet pilot was flipping a switch to turn off the Typhoon’s lights as he flew up Lake Windermere, briefly scratching his nose under the VR headset.

The conflict scenario that played out at BAE Systems' Warton base this week involved no boots on the ground, no helicopters, no jets and no civilians. Instead it took place inside a metaverse with all but a handful of roles being played by computers.

Although the metaverse concept is most heavily promoted by Facebook owner Meta, alternatives to the socially awkward virtual offices that Mark Zuckerberg thinks are the future of workplaces have found a niche within the defence sector.

With estimates pegging the global market for military metaverse technology at up to £17bn by the year 2030, the ability to build a large-scale virtual world which can be used to conduct and analyse a full-scale war has obvious benefits.

Metaverse technology can allow hundreds or even thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen to train on a scale that would otherwise cost millions of pounds to stage for real.

The Warton metaverse, named Project Odyssey, is a private initiative part-funded to the tune of £2m by BAE Systems, although a recent Ministry of Defence contract for “populating the world of training” seems closely related to it.

Seven tech startups from around the UK have pooled their technical expertise over the last 12 months to make Project Odyssey operational.

Tim Colebrooke, a training strategy manager with BAE Systems, says the project is ahead of the rest of the world in terms of what it can achieve: “This kind of capability is not available in the UK at the moment. The United States military has similar capabilities but it’s not a single synthetic environment like this one.”

Mimi Keshani, co-founder of tech startup Hadean, explains that the tech underpinning the metaverse part of Project Odyssey has been successfully tested with around 60,000 computer-generated "entities" active at one time.

Flight simulator room at BAE Systems
Digital simulation is an increasingly attractive alternative to running live military exercises Credit: Jon Super for The Daily Telegraph/Jon Super for The Daily Telegraph

This compares well even with online multiplayer games which typically only support a few hundred AI-generated characters and human players at any one time.

Ms Keshani says Hadean gained experience of working with games such as Minecraft and Eve Online before looking at the defence sector.

“What we realised is the tech that supports a commercial metaverse - the online game environment - is exactly the same infrastructure that's required for synthetic training environments,” says the Hadean co-founder.

In the Warton metaverse an armoured convoy from Bluelandia (better known to Britons as the Lake District town of Kendal) is driving to support beleaguered colleagues in the disputed land of Orangia (or Windermere), while helicopters from Redlandia (Penrith) carry out an airstrike against them.

Philip Pauley, director of “digital twinning” company Pauley, puts on a pair of augmented reality glasses and looks across the exercise operations room.

A 3D digital vision of the battlefield is projected in front of him, helicopters and fighter jets twirling above the ground as the vehicles plough onwards to their destination.

Meanwhile, the tactical controller from Bluelandia has taken a knee as he prepares to call in the Typhoon fighter jets for a second low pass. 

The binoculars he puts to his virtual reality headset are real but the view from their lenses is visible on instructors’ computer screens thanks to advanced visualisation technology.

Craig Haslam, a former Royal Marine joint tactical air controller who is now chief executive of startup D3A Defence explains: “Using simulation for this we can change the geographical locations as we need. We can train in dense wooded terrain or deserts, we can train it wherever we need to.”

Digital simulation is an increasingly attractive alternative to running live military exercises, for reasons of space as well as cost.

BAE Systems’ Mr Colebrooke, who served in the RAF as a Tornado navigator, explained that while in his day air weapons ranges needed to be around 250 miles long, modern air-to-air missiles require blocks of sky "the size of the UK" to test to their full potential.

Combining those live weapons ranges with ground and sea units is expensive and time-consuming, to the point where Britain only does it twice a year during its Joint Warrior exercises around Scotland.

“What you're seeing today is a collection of disparate simulators traditionally used to train individuals,” says Mr Colebrooke. “We’re able to bring all of that together in a single synthetic environment.

“All of those simulators you're looking at are seeing the same common operating picture, the same version of the world,” he enthuses.

A short distance from the Project Odyssey building stands an English Electric Lightning, guarding the entrance to Warton airfield. The 1960s interceptor looks rather forlorn in the driving sleet of a chilly March afternoon.

Yet as the Mach 2 fighter jet was once the pinnacle of British science and technology, so the humming computer servers in the building behind it hold similar promises for the modern era.

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