Wright Patterson Air Force Base (Tec^Edge) division holds Summer At The Tech Edge (SATE) where they combine one thousand college and high school computer science students to work on innovative Air Force Research Lab projects including robotics, virtual worlds, motion tracking, and much more. The Air Force recognized that Metaverses have limitations regarding bandwidth and scripting limitations that would not allow the students to build the complex coding algorithms they needed to build their computer science projects. The Air Force Research Lab wanted to have full control over the servers and intellectual property built by the students therefore a browser-based metaverse that could be hosted on government servers would be ideal for their needs.
A custom-designed metaverse consisting of eight server grids and a complex network of communication protocols to handle the one thousand students over the summer was proposed. The development of the Metaverse would allow for meeting rooms, a large size sandbox for students to build projects, war game simulations, a multitude of dynamic controllers for Robotics, and communication between cell phones and the metaverse. The server-side system was also managed by a web-based administration system.
