You blast out of the pits, accelerating to 160 mph in a mere 8 seconds. Your adrenaline surges as you navigate among the 30 other careening stock cars, all blazing wildly around a hot asphalt track.
Ahead, the lead car suddenly loses control, spinning into the side wall and disintegrating. Hunks of debris are thrown into the air, one of which hits and cracks your windscreen.
Disappointed, you turn off your computer. Your hopes for the $100,000 grand prize have just been flushed down the toilet.
Computer simulation of real life events continues to advance at an astonishing pace; the scenario described above, including the real cash prize, may happen in the next decade or so. Race car and combat video games have been popular for some time now, but a true simulation is much more than a game. While a game has entertainment as its main goal, a simulation fails when it isn't absolutely realistic.
In a race car game, the cars may be allowed to go insanely fast, handle insanely well, and not be damaged in a 300 mph collision. A good racing simulation, on the other hand, seeks solely to mimic every feature of the real life experience, including hot tires gripping well, lower top speed when fuel is full, cracked windscreens, more drag with damaged fenders, and slip streaming. The learning curve is steep, and a miscalculation can put you out of the race for good.
The fact of the matter is that simulations are becoming so real that they're effective training tools for real life tasks. In the case of car racing, NASCAR seriously intends to make virtual racing their 13th official division, complete with cash prizes, product sponsorships, time trials, and licensed officials. Eventually, position sensors will be fitted on real life Indy cars, which will allow virtual racers to compete against the real thing, in real time.
That may be a decade or more away, but in the immediate future, NASCAR and a company called Sierra Online will offer pay-for-play dial-up competitive racing, so that you and scores of people around the world can race on super-authentic courses; in some cases, you'll be racing against actual NASCAR drivers.
But the world of simulations is not all fun and games.
The Department of Defense (which funded the creation of the earliest beginnings of the Internet) has long been running combat simulations in the bowels of their research laboratories. Today, a large scale simulation may include a thousand human participants and nine thousand simulated vehicles and equipment.
By the turn of the century, they hope to be able to support combat scenarios a hundred times that size, including the complex effects of smokey explosions, variable weather systems, and unpredictable terrain types. At present, the DOD is spending half a billion dollars annually on combat simulation systems.
And what happens when you mix PC-based simulation technology with the military's war-readiness goals? Marine Doom, a customized version of Doom, the world's most popular first-person nail gun and bazooka blood bath home computer game, has been embraced by the Marine Corps as a valuable training tool.
Doom is particularly suited to the Corps; unlike the other branches of the military which are constantly developing bigger, smarter, and more powerful machines to help win battles, the fundamental technique of the Marine Corps is to send lots and lots of powerful, aggressive young men into the fight, armed only with rifles.
This strategy involves four man teams; two riflemen, a machine gunner, and a team leader to bark orders. So, for Doom training, these teams sit at four Pentium computers with the speakers turned up all the way, and blast the enemy into bloody scraps. The fire team leader coordinates the attack in bunkers, fields, or whatever other battlefields the Marines' software programmers create. They've even begun digitizing the floor plans of American embassies around the world, so that Marines can practice storming the premises in the event they're taken over by hostile forces.
Computer simulations are clearly the wave of the future. From auto racing to war simulations to architectural design to virtual heart surgery, the utility of the technology is undeniably exciting, if a little bit scary at times as well.
© 1997
John Masterson