Accompanying the improvement in off-the-shelf commercial technology has been a boom in military interest in virtual reality. Put simply, without the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, virtual reality wouldn't be where it is today.
"The urgency of war required novel solutions," says Rizzo, noting that tens of millions of dollars of US military funding has "fed the scientists in my lab over the last few years". The reason for that funding is simple: virtual reality offers a means of rehabilitating war veterans effectively yet cheaply.
One method being pioneered by Rizzo involves taking a veteran through a traumatic incident by immersing them in a recreation of that incident in a virtual world. Clinical trials of the method are still continuing, but "so far all the data has been promising and positive", he says.
Just as virtual reality is being used to help soldiers reintegrate into society after returning from war, it is also being used to train them for fighting in the first place.
The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at the Ministry of Defence is investigating how virtual reality technology can be used to give the British army an edge in the field. Andrew Poulter leads the research and says that virtual reality training has a number of advantages over traditional training in the field.
Take, for example, training soldiers driving in a convoy how to respond to an ambush or an improvised explosive device (IED) attack, as troops in Afghanistan have experienced. Recreating that experience in the field repeatedly requires a significant amount of time and resources. "In a simulation, you can reset back to the beginning and go straight away again," says Poulter. Indeed, research published in 2008, looking at US, Canadian and British forces, showed that soldiers appear to be better prepared for combat when they have been trained in a virtual reality environment as well as in the field. But Poulter is somewhat downbeat about the advantage immersive headsets have over simple desktop monitors, keyboards and mouses. "There's very little done with headsets," says Poulter, for the simple reason that a headset can also prevent the soldiers from performing simple tasks such as taking notes or operating a radio.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/02/are-you-ready-for-virtual-reality-revolution-google-cardboard
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