Effective game-based training at the point of need

Abstract

The military requires delivery of training to the warfighter at the point of need, which means whenever and wherever the training is needed. We set out to determine if a soldier could train using a graphically intensive game hosted in a “cloud.” We conducted a usability study in a lab with twelve participants trying to complete a mission using a military simulation training game. The participants played the game in ten different configurations that varied the number of VMs per server, CPU cores and CPU topologies of the VMs, screen resolution settings, and WAN emulator bandwidth and latency settings. The usability study found that the simulation training game performed acceptably in a virtualized environment. It also determined that with the specific hardware and network characteristics used in the study, participants rated 6-8 VMs set to low-resolution best.