We’ve already reported on the Naval Underseas Warfare Center (NUWC), a virtual home where members of the US Navy can train on a virtual submarine. Now Virtual Worlds News has the inside scoop on the Navy’s upcoming training sessions that will be held in a virtual world built by Qwaq using their Qwaq Forums, a “secure virtual workspace that combines voice, video and chat communications with multi-application and document sharing.”

According to an interview with a team leader at the NUWC, cost savings is one of the main selling points of using a virtual training space.

“A lot of ROI is looking at the ability of the virtual space to have greater flexibility in experimentation,” said Steve Aguiar, Metaverse Exploration Project lead, to VWN.

As an entity whose R&D has brought countless innovations – both good and bad – the Navy (and the US military as a whole) also cites the ability of virtual training to expand what he calls “hypothesis testing,” or, in layman’s terms, rearranging the innards of a submarine.

“You get a much greater ability to do hypothesis testing in virtual spaces because the cost of each hypothesis is so low compared to what we used to do,” he said.

Aguiar goes on to outline the five main applications for virtual worlds, including an interesting proposition – data visualization – that connects VWs more deeply with the real world. Read the rest of the post here.