By Pete Carey, Contra Costa Times
via PoliceOne.com

I zipped up the flack jacket, put on an Army helmet and snapped a pair of goggles over my eyes.

Suddenly I was crouching with a squad of infantrymen on a dusty street in a village somewhere in Afghanistan.

Or my avatar was. But I bear witness — it felt like I was there.

If I turned my head, the 3-D scene and point of view changed. I could walk in any direction, kneel or stand up and the scene would change as I moved. I could fire my weapon — a realistic M4 rifle replica loaded with electronics — and see the bullets hit their target.

Glancing up at the building a hundred yards away that our intelligence said contained seven bad guys, I spotted a sniper on the roof.

Shouldering my rifle, I fired.

“You took him out!”

That was the voice of Pratish Shah, marketing director of Quantum3D, a San Jose company that makes the virtual reality system for training combat troops. The company recently announced that it and a partner firm, Intelligent Decisions of Virginia, had won a competition to provide the Army with a 3-D infantry training system.

The system — a kind of flight simulator for soldiers — offers a vision of what gaming software might be like a few years from now when the technology becomes more affordable.

Shah was instructing me in the use of the system, dubbed ExpeditionDI, in a conference room in Quantum3D’s South San Jose headquarters.

ExpeditionDI is the first wearable infantry simulator training platform that immerses wearers in combat situations, according to the company. It comes with a high-resolution head-mounted display, a battery-powered computing backpack and a microphone headset for communicating with other squad members. A gaming-type engine controls a vivid virtual reality world.

Read the full article on PoliceOne.com.