Exploring the Potential of Virtual Worlds for Decentralized Command and Control

This report describes results from a research study investigating how virtual world (VW) concepts, techniques, and tools can be employed to create an online environment that supports experiments in Decentralized Command and Control. We refer to this project and the VW we have prototyped collectively as the DECENT project and system platform. DECENT is a platform for exercising and assessing the potential of a game-based VW approach to decentralized C2, as well as to compare our efforts with others closely related. Overall, we find this effort gives rise to very promising results that point to additional opportunities and system extensions for new ways to consider the potential of decentralized approaches to C2 that merit further systematic investigation and experimentation. This report provides description of the approach to prototyping and initially evaluating some of the potential of DCC systems based on VW technologies.