How did the Synthetic Theater of War project model a large military battle?

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early head-mounted display device — virtual reality Early head-mounted display device developed by Ivan Sutherland at Harvard University, c. 1967.

The U.S. Army’s Synthetic Theater of War (STOW) project, demonstrated in 1997, modeled a large military battle by utilizing a large-scale distributed simulation. This system was designed to be capable of involving thousands of participants in a complete theatre battle.1

The project followed a lineage of networked virtual environments, such as the SIMulator NETworking (SIMNET) project, which pioneered the linking of individual simulators to facilitate collective training. By building upon these earlier efforts, the Synthetic Theater of War expanded the scope of computer-based war gaming to simulate complex, theater-wide operations through distributed network technology.1