"These games are essentially meant to provide soldiers with a myriad of experiences in developing situational awareness," said Dr. Goldberg

Dr. Stephen Goldberg, with the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Robert Sottilare, Research, Development and Engineering Command's Simulation and Training Technology Center, spoke with bloggers during an Army Bloggers Roundtable yesterday about their involvement in managing research on applying new technologies to Army training, in particular the areas of virtual training environments in the 21st century.

"We're interested in how to design, develop and utilize those technologies within a distributed setting, so having soldiers at different locations be able to, you know, essentially dial in to the same environment and carry out training together, even though they're not co-located," said Goldberg.

Goldberg and Sottilare explained a virtual training opportunity that they will be conducting with the United Kingdom next week.

"We're involved in right now that's going to actually take place next week is kind of the crawl part of a three- phase effort, is we're working with researchers and soldiers in the United Kingdom, and we're going to be bringing them via a distributed game into an environment to carry out some military operations together as a coalition at the very lowest level. So next week we'll be rescuing the embassy personnel from some small, unknown country," said Goldberg.