A United States Department of Defense Metaverse could provide significant benefit to advance the missions of the military services, but there are significant challenges to realizing its full potential. The DoD Metaverse could quickly up -skill warfighters, allow for the integration of technologies and services across the DoD, enable unprecedented command and control capabilities, inform new design and deployment decisions for technologies coming out of the research laboratories and serve as a training tool to equip warfighters for real world scenarios. Digital prototyping could improve the adoption capacity of impactful disruptive technologies and help propel their transition path to the physical world. For these benefits to be fully realized, however, key obstacles to wide scale adopt ion need to be addressed. The DoD needs interoperable and secure architectures to be able to share investment into the development of these synthetic environments. Siloed networks, slow acquisition pipelines, and a lack of understanding are preventing the DoD from adopting the very tools that will help improve its adoption capacity of other critical technologies. As we learn to overcome these challenges, we will need to address the legal, moral, ethical, and security considerations of having service members immersed into these virtual worlds. This paper will help the reader better understand metaverse technologies and their fundamental concepts. It will highlight essential components, outstanding required functionality, and specific opportunities for early adoption.

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Misty Blowers, Nelson Jaimes, and Jon Williams, "Benefits and challenges of a military metaverse," Proc. SPIE 12542, Disruptive Technologies in Information Sciences VII, 125420N (Presented at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing: May 02, 2023; Published: 15 June 2023); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2663772.