The Virtual World Framework (VWF) is a browser-based technology suite created by the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (OSD/PR). The current prototype supports efforts to create, collaborative, 3-dimensional spaces leveraging new web standards such as HTML5, Web Sockets, and WebGL that work in browsers without the installation of plugins or other software. As stated in 2011 (Boyd, Smith), "as the full VWF ecosystem emerges, an open and accessible architecture approach will allow users and third parties to add customized content, behaviors, and technologies to create new applications and create a virtuous cycle of value directly benefiting all users of the system." At this nascent stage, there have been few operational demonstrations created that tests the VWF's capabilities and showcases its possibilities for instruction.
Joint Knowledge Online (JKO) has a very specific mission to educate the Joint Warfighter, and took on the challenge of piloting a VWF application that would support their training objectives for their required Combating Trafficking in Persons (CTIP) course. Additionally, JKO wanted to push the VWF envelope to augment the Warfighter's mobile training initiative. This paper will describe the efforts taken by CTC and ECS, Inc., to create this pilot for JKO.
We will describe several technical approaches to delivering immersive world content within the VWF to mobile platforms (namely iOS and Android). We will describe the challenges, successes, and methodologies developed to deliver this capability for mobile browsers. We will include performance analyses, descriptions of experiments conducted employing 3D, 2D, and 2.5 D techniques, an explanation of how the final product was built and delivered as a fielded product for JKO, along with future work we see in this area.