BANC 3, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: AFX234-DCSO2

Description

Special Operations Forces (SOF) across the US military are tasked with planning and executing no-fail missions within the United States and abroad. To train for these missions, SOF requires highly specialized and mission-contextualized training facilities and equipment where they can conduct crawl-, walk-, run-repetitions to hone their tradecraft before mission execution. For example, the skills necessary to covertly conduct reconnaissance and characterization of physical, analog, and digital security systems of a foreign installation, gain undetected entry into that installation, and then complete necessary steps to recover critical assets secured in that installation requires a pinnacle level of planning and rehearsal that is truly SOF-peculiar. Support for this type of hyperspecialized training facility, which aims to provide the most ecologically valid planning and rehearsal capabilities possible, requires: (i) dedicated tradecraft subject-matter experts; (ii) the ability to rapidly recreate all aspects of mission-critical environments (e.g., replicate the anticipated security systems that will need to be defeated); (iii) the ability to induce stress and cognitive workload akin to what trainees will experience on target; and (iv) the ability to quickly reconfigure the overall facility and minute details of a training scenario to support the effective training repetitions that yield the necessary SOF Operator readiness. There are fundamental limitations of the infrastructure and solutions that currently support this hyperspecialized training, including (i) an inability to rapidly reconfigure macro- and micro-elements of training facilities to achieve the variance in scenario repetitions needed to achieve the highest possible mission readiness; (ii) significant costs and lead times associated with acquiring specialized equipment and regionally appropriate assets needed to achieve ecological validity in training environment fidelity; (iii) an inability to create highly dynamic and adaptive training scenarios tailored to an individual's skills and performance on a per scenario basis; and (iv) an inability to repeatably stimulate multiple operator sensory channels with enough variance across scenario repetitions to effectively induce the stress that operators experience on target. Congress just passed the CHIPS act which includes instructions for the NSF to invest in XR technology because they recognize the power and cost savings of virtual training. Until now, most XR training systems work better in the lab than they do in the field in the hands of a warfighter, but HADES will change that by combining cutting edge off-the-shelf components such as new head and body tracking systems used in the motion picture industry with our military and commercial XR headset design expertise. And by designing an open platform, we leave HADES open to future expansion with body tracking, tool and weapon tracking, and on-the-fly reconfigurable training sessions.