Video-game companies create a theater of war: sophisticated simulation technology provides realistic, cost-effective and safe training scenarios.

• Position: DEPLOY: GAMING

When a paratrooper from Fort Bragg's 82nd Airborne Division prepares to jump from the open bay of a C-17, he hopes the jumpmaster who inspected his gear knew what he was doing. Thanks to Tar Heel-developed digital simulation and gaming technology, that jump is less a leap of faith than a vote of confidence. Fayetteville-based Immersion Media Inc. designed 3-D motion-capture video training for the jumpmaster course with the help of a $44,000 Defense and Security Technology Accelerator Fusion Grant, awarded by the Pentagon to help early-stage companies develop and prove their technologies. Only about half of jumpmaster students at Fort Bragg's Advanced Airborne School passed the demanding course before Immersion's training system was integrated in 2011, President Rick Perko says. Now the pass rate is 70%.

Immersion is one of a handful of North Carolina companies developing video-gaming technology to safely and cost-effectively train the nation's armed forces. Gaming is a subset of computer simulation, an umbrella of technologies that can help the military train troops, run "what-if' scenarios, analyze equipment and develop new combat strategies, says Randy Avent, a computer science professor at N.C. State University. "I couldn't even guess how much the Department of Defense spends on simulation, probably billions. Simulation is rooted in every defense organization,"

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Virtual Heroes Inc. in Raleigh helped take gaming into the world of military training a decade ago. The popular America's Army game was conceived in 2002 at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., as a recruiting tool. Virtual Heroes contributed computer code and content to the game, transforming it into a major training tool with more than 10 million registered users.

"Everything started with flight simulators," says Randy Brown, manager of Virtual Heroes, a division of Albuquerque, N.M.-based Applied Research Associates Inc. Motion games such as flight simulators are a mainstay of military education, but the technology can also be applied to other types of training. For example, Virtual Heroes recently developed a game to help Special Forces soldiers hone their negotiation skills. Adaptive Thinking and Leadership incorporates biometrics monitoring, allowing training officers to see which soldiers become anxious and which stay cool under pressure. "It's still an immersive, multiplayer environment that puts soldiers against an indigenous team to...