Blended training has become an increasingly prominent answer to the military’s need to train warfighters. Especially in areas where there simply aren’t enough real, physical assets available to train the number of personnel—like aviators—that the military requires, it is ever more important that trainees are getting meaningful, insightful, and ultimately effective training in any training environment being employed.
What’s more, new, emerging technologies stand to make blended training an even more dynamic, yet cost-effective, solution for meeting combat readiness requirements.
In order to get a better sense of which of these emerging technologies we should keep an eye on, we asked several industry experts in blended training what innovations they expect to see in the future.
“There’s been a half billion dollars invested in technologies that connect the air to the ground,” started Chip Gilkison, who leads the business development team for Live/Blended Test & Training at Collins Aerospace. According to Gilkison, more customers will notice the investments that are being made and will start to leverage these new technologies, particularly because many of those connected solutions are already DoD programs of record. All of this, Gilkison predicts, will enable the delivery of the technology into the hands of the warfighters faster.
In addition to increased investments, other experts anticipate increased utilization of virtual assets like cloud platforms and virtual reality (VR).
Virtual assets may even replace more traditional physical assets. “I think you’re going to see a reduction in hardware due to virtualization,” Shawn Rodier, vice president at JANUS Research, told us, citing the potential for more immersive VR with integrated haptics.
Integrating more virtual assets into the training equation can also just make a training program more flexible. As more training components are stored on a virtual, cloud-based platform, Jeanette Ling, Principal Engineer at Collins Aerospace, noted that you have the flexibility to “meet the requirements of a wide range of use cases while still benefiting from targeted use of the cloud.”
Among those components on the back end could also be a host of different types of machine intelligence too, according to Mike Wikan, Creative Director for Booz Allen Hamilton’s Immersive Group, that can run analyses on training performance so that the armed services get the most insight they can out of the data they are collecting.
You can watch the full video on what these experts foresee in blended training here:
