Year
2016
Abstract
Virtual environments have been successfully used to support a variety of applications relevant to nuclear safeguards, safety, and security, including IAEA inspector training, dose estimates for personnel, and facility evacuation planning. Here, we explore the potential of these environments to support innovations in nuclear arms control, in partic- ular, the role they could play in developing facility architectures and verification protocols for treaties that do not yet exist. These treaties are likely to require new types of onsite inspections, including at nuclear warhead dismantlement facilities, or envision “managed ac- cess” to other military nuclear sites. Virtual environments could make critical contributions to the development of adequate inspection protocols without running the risk of exposing proliferation-sensitive or classified information, which would be a plausible concern in physi- cal facilities. Virtual environments can also offer levels of accessibility and flexibility typically much more difficult to achieve in actual facilities, and they can allow for more substantial collaboration amongst research groups and governments working to find solutions to existing verification challenges. As an example, this paper discusses the use of the Vizmove Walking Virtual Reality System, a wide-area VR system that combines the Oculus Rift head-mounted display with motion trackers for up to 2500 square meters of real space. Users can walk around in real space, and the motion trackers translate their movement to the virtual en- vironment, enabling a more immersive and realistic virtual collaboration experience. This paper illustrates how virtual nuclear facilities can be employed in FMVR to simulate and help refine a number of developing concepts related to arms control verification, including weapon authentication, tracking and monitoring mechanisms, as well as an overview of how virtual radiation could be constructed and employed in this type of VR system.