Experts Fawkes & Burden Chart the Rise of the Military Metaverse in New Book

The Military Metaverse, a new book written by MS&T's Andy Fawkes and David Burden will be published by Routledge on 1st May.  Andy has previously written about the military metaverse for MS&T in2020 and 2022 and both he and David have many years' experience conducting related research including for the UK's Dstl and wider NATO.

The book examines the past, present and future of the metaverse technologies including simulation, virtual worlds, avatars and XR. It explores the impact that the Metaverse is having today on how the world’s militaries procure, maintain, train, plan, and fight, and how the Metaverse presents new challenges and opportunities for future conflict.

The book highlights that the military were early adopters of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies and wider simulation systems. Before 2010 they were one of the few sectors that could afford the technology, and millions of military R&D dollars went into developing and understanding these technologies. However, as the democratisation of Metaverse technologies has happened over the past decade, there is a danger that militaries have been overtaken and caught short, encumbered with often costly legacy systems, sold and maintained by prime contractors, while the gaming and consumer market has cheaper and more innovative and agile systems. 

This book provides a history of the use of Metaverse technologies in the military, particularly in the areas of design, maintenance, training, planning, and operations. It then examines the current state of the art in these areas and the opportunities that are available from the current generation of consumer-driven approaches. 

The drivers for, challenges to, and paths towards an enterprise approach to the Military Metaverse are then presented. The book explores the military use of social virtual worlds, of early work done by defence and security organisations in worlds such as Second Life, and how such environments could become important for intelligence as well as influence operations in the future. Finally, the book will consider what war in the Metaverse might look like, in terms of both in-world activities and the impact of cyber-war on the Metaverse itself.

This book should be of interest to all militaries across the world, the industries that support them, and those in academia and the wider public with an interest in the military, defence and the metaverse.

Andy and David will be holding a launch event (in the metaverse, naturally!) and they hope many of you will join them there. Full details at:

The book is available through:

Routledge 

and

Amazon