From Asia Times, April 21:
Superpower rivalry extending to the virtual realm where US has a tech edge but China believes it is culturally superior
In yet another realm of US-China rivalry, both superpowers are treating the emerging metaverse as a contested military domain.
The metaverse is a digital, parallel world created thanks to developments in the internet, virtual reality, networking technologies and augmented reality, to name but a few of its technological enablers. Currently, there is no single unified metaverse but rather fragmentation of multiple metaverses created by various companies and programmers.
While the concept and technologies are still in their infancy, the metaverse has many diverse and significant defense applications ranging from training, mission planning and simulation, weapons design and even combat operations. That potential is already putting the US and China on a virtual world collision course.
In an article published last month in the Military Cyber Professionals Association, Josh Baughman from the National Defense University wrote that China views the metaverse as providing a “parallel cognitive space that digitally twins real combat scenarios, where cognitive warfare can be advanced efficiently and enhanced at a fast pace.”
He added that an attack on an adversary’s metaverse can “affect the opponent’s thinking, cognition, and action decision making.” Baughman opined that China views the US as far ahead in metaverse technology but that it views itself as superior from a cultural and substantive viewpoint....
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