Immersive Training System Accommodates 50,000 Players.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

* LONDON--A simulator being developed for the British Army has the capability to accommodate up to 50,000 players simultaneously.

CAE, the Canada-based modeling and simulation company, is offering its Dynamic Synthetic Environment that will allow multitudes of participants to train for army tasks such as infantry maneuvers, driving fighting vehicles, piloting aircraft or observing operations from an unmanned aerial vehicle, said Richard Woollam, capture manager of defense and strategy at CAE's defense and security division.

This is "collective training to bring together players from different disciplines, using different platforms and equipment," he said.

CAE is developing the system to compete for the British Army's Future Collective Training System, which is part of the service's long-term campaign to modernize its currently out-of-date training with live, virtual and constructive systems called the Collective Training Transformation Program.

"People with different roles will be able to play together. They share across distributed environments, so players in different countries can work through the cloud in a single synthetic environment," Woollam said.

In a demonstration at CAE's booth at the recent IT2EC conference in London, participants in different parts of the world played out a scenario where soldiers searched a building in an urban area for a high-value target.

One player in CAE's U.K. home office about 50 miles away played the role of a vehicle driver. She drove a troop carrier to the objective, while another player in the booth operated an Apache helicopter on a...