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Chapter 14. Taking Virtual Tours

In the 1980s, military doctrine was pretty simple. Whoever controlled the next medium controlled the world and that next medium was Space. Space was the last of the four great media (land, sea, air, and space). And that was all there was, but since the 1980s a number of new global factors have come into play, namely those mentioned in the Seven Revolutions of Chapter 12. And in this new millennium two new media will dominate the world stage: nanotechnology and virtual reality.

As our technology crazed world moves forward, the benefits and threats of new technologies emerge. World planners wrestle with where to invest their resources in order to gain the greatest advantage for society. With technology changing so rapidly, programming interfaces must be built that generate code at a blazing pace to keep up. With the advent of Adobe's new Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder, code is now being generated automatically – and that's a huge leap forward.

In this chapter, you take a brief look at how the military is using virtual technology, augmented reality, and building 3D worlds.

Hello "Uncle Sam"

Applying virtual reality to military development has two sides: the yin and the yang. The yin part is the soft side of "military-virtual" reality and it looks really good to policy makers: acceleration of development schedules and fewer people getting killed in deployment testing. The yang part is the hard side of "military-virtual" reality and it sounds really good ...