Epic's Unreal Engine technology has continued to evolve over the years to become the most widely used middleware solution for many of the hottest looking games across PC, console and mobile platforms. Today, the North Carolina-based independent developer has announced the Unreal Government Network (UGC), a partnership with an organisation called Virtual Heroes that will see the Unreal Engine 3 tech licensed out to a wide array of US government and Medical Research and Education departments.

Some projects under this initiative are already in development, including a simulator to train military anaesthesiologists and some kind of mulitplayer crime-scene training program for the FBI.

• The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) awarded ARA-Virtual Heroes a $10M, multi-year contract under the Sirius program. The goal of the Sirius program is to develop serious games that result in better decision-making by teaching participants to recognise and mitigate the effects of their own biases when analyzing information used to make decisions.
  
• Virtual Heroes, in collaboration with the Duke University Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center, is creating an anesthesiology training application for Army physicians.
  
• Virtual Heroes is developing the UE3-powered HumanSim platform for medical education and training.
  
• The FBI Academy is using UE3 to develop a multiplayer crime scene training simulation to meet the needs of the FBI.
  
• A top five defense contractor and a national laboratory have licensed UE3 and UGN to address their needs for custom model integrations and visualization.

Details on several previous Virtual Heroes projects can be found in this showcase at unrealengine.com.