It has been built by Skyral, a UK company that is part of a consortium that recently won a £2bn contract from the Ministry of Defence to train the British army. They may not perfectly replicate the real world, but they allow soldiers to train key skills on repeat. They began with the virtual worlds that Improbable had developed, Hulme said. “If you swap, like, wizards for soldiers and dragons for tanks, it becomes really sort of defence applicable.” The term originally referred to virtual models of machines, such as cars, that enabled predictive maintenance – for example, by simulating how the brake pads might wear down after five years’ use.