Yesterday I went on a little "military" journey.

Morning was spent at a DSTA building at the Science Park. The DSTA people gave us a talk on the DSTA scholarship, which was exactly the same as the one I heard when they came to VJC for scholarship talk. There were also talks by two men, one navy guy who briefly told us some of the technologies in the new shealth frigates Singapore recently got. The other was a middle-aged guy who deals with electromagnetics at DSO.

After lunch buses took us to the SAF Centre of Military Experimentation, and that's where the excitement began. Located inside a camp, its a small building which consists of three labs which they supposedly try out new technologies to help them fight better battles.

There is this lab up on the 2nd storey which looks like some LAN game centre/underground hacking centre. There are computers all over the place running powerful workstations, some complete with joysticks that simulate fighter jets and choppers and tanks, all fighting out in one same battlefield that can be seen and tracked on other computers. Located in a corner is a cluster of computers where commercial off-the-shelf software like Black Hawk Down and Counterstrike and Generals and Battlefield, among others, were installed for play.

Besides gaming there are also terminals where people develop these simulators. When I was there I saw at least two female programmers who were, I think, doing some debugging work on Visual Studio. Female hard-core programmers. Haha.

Down at the first level there was this mock command post where there are huge touchscreens with numerous other lcd screens which supposedly allows commanders to transmit information to foot soldiers in the field. The hosts explained some of their technologies to us, like tablet PCs and PDAs running 3D maps of Singapore on Google Earth-like software, and also their private search engine which they use to hunt out terrorists. Maybe they will use that to hunt this blog down huh? Haha.

Overall I find this trip very informative and fun, especially the SCME tour. This lab, having just set up not too long ago, is not something I see in news often, so through this tour I learnt more about real cool place. Although a little part of me prefers to be carrying a gun and running out in the field, I don't mind working in this lab too, if I get a chance to go in the first place.