From Signal, August 2009, this snippet resonates for me as it matches our experience:
"In terms of adoption throughout the U.S. Navy, Aguiar reveals that he has received a lot of positive interest from various levels of the service. The interest is across many applications—from rapid prototyping and collaborative design to training and education to public outreach and visualization of human system integration, he shares.
It is extremely difficult to speculate where virtual world technology and the military’s use of it will be even as soon as three years from now, Aguiar notes. Analysis by the Gartner Group in 2008 estimated that virtual worlds are evolving five times faster than the evolution of the Internet.
“If you look at analysis by organizations like the Gartner Group, they report that these virtual worlds, in general, are at the maturity level of the Internet in 1993. That means that from business perspective, from a use case perspective and from a capability perspective, there is a lot of potential. It can do enough to create some strong demonstrations and some specific applications, but it really is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the impact these products are going to make. And the statistics again say that by 2012, 80 percent of all Internet users may have a virtual world representation—an avatar,” he shares."
This also caught my eye from the downbar ( a Judes word: the sidebar below the article) titled Coalition Island Bridges Gaps Between Services.
"This approach to modeling and simulation is not necessarily restricted to prototypes. Sechser notes that an Apache helicopter already exists in Second Life. “It’s phenomenal, and I don’t use the word ‘phenomenal’ very often,” he states. A 10-page instruction manual about how to fly the Apache accompanies the model. “I want to say that anyone who’s gone ahead and read all the instructions and done everything to fly this thing in Second Life is going to be way ahead of anyone who has not done the same thing,” he adds."http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/templates/Signal_Article_Template.asp?articleid=2023&zoneid=269
