Last week MÄK exhibited at the LAAD Defence & Security Exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, along with our local reseller OpenCadd. The biennial event brings together Brazilian and international companies specialized in supplying equipment, services and technology to the Armed Forces, Police and Special Forces, Security Services, consultants, and government agencies.

This year seemed to be the largest show to date, taking up 3 large pavilions, each with a variety of local companies and system integrators, as well as a large South American and international participation. The event consisted of a variety of offerings from very large trucks and armored vehicles to marine simulation training devices.

Once the VR-Forces 4.1 release was completed and uploaded to the FTP site, we decided to have the VR-Forces team relax a little and express their creativity to see what could be accomplished with the new Scripted Task feature of VR-Forces.

If you haven’t already heard about it, Scripted Tasking is a brand new feature in VR-Forces 4.1 that brings scripting to the forefront and allows any VR-Forces user with even just a little programming or hacking skills build their own tasks and behaviors.  We’ve incorporated the well known Lua scripting language into the base VR-Forces, and allowed access to much of the VR-Forces API.  New tasks that you write can now be saved directly into a scenario, and easily exchanged among users.

Using this feature, it is possible to create all sorts of new tasks and behaviors in VR-Forces by combining any of the existing tasks, passing messages between entities, and inspecting the state of various elements in the simulation.  To see just how flexible the scripting interface is, we had one simple rule:  Make any behaviors you want!

VR-Forces 4.1 introduces significant changes to the Move to Waypoint and Move to Location tasks.

Ever since VR-Forces 3.8 (back in 2005), Move to Waypoint and Move to Location tasks have offered the options to move directly to the destination or to plan a path. When path planning was enabled, if the entity identified a vector road network between the start point and destination, it tried to use the road network for the appropriate segment of the movement task. In VR-Forces 4.0, we introduced Road Following, an improved algorithm for moving along roads. Unfortunately, vehicles often had problems making the transition from off-road movement to moving on roads, which resulted in poor vehicle behavior.

To solve this problem, in VR-Forces 4.1, we have separated the direct movement and road following tasks. The result is better overall vehicle movement at the cost of slightly less realistic transitions from off-road movement to road following. We now have three flavors of the Move to Waypoint and Move to Location tasks:

We are almost ready to release our beta version of VR-Link for Unity - an HLA/DIS Interoperability module for the Unity Engine!  The official 1.0 release is scheduled for late February.  Meanwhile, you can see a quick demo video here.

On the right, you'll see a helicopter flying a route in VR-Forces. And on the left, you'll see that same helicopter being reflected in real-time into a Unity-based sample application - over HLA through the new VR-Link for Unity asset.  For this demo, we used Unity's well-known "bootcamp" sample terrain, which we also loaded into VR-Forces by exporting it as a height field and image.  And through VR-Link for Unity's model-mapping GUI, we mapped the HLA entity type to a pre-existing Unity helicopter asset.

VR-Link for Unity gives you access to HLA/DIS objects and interactions directly from Unity's standard C# scripting and development environment, so that your Unity applications become natively HLA and DIS compliant.  But since the module is built on our traditional C++ VR-Link libraries, it supports all the various flavors of HLA and DIS and works with any RTI that conforms to the appropriate HLA standards.  You can also leverage VR-Link's FOM mapping capability to support custom HLA FOMs.  If you're building M&S applications on the Unity Engine, and are interested in DIS/HLA interoperability, we'd love to hear from you.  If you are interested in participating in our beta program, or even just willing to help by describing some of your Unity-based projects, please drop us a note at unity@mak.com!

We're here at the Transportation Research Board's (TRB) annual conference in Washington D.C. with transportation professionals from around the world; we've seen members of federal, state, and local governments, along with plenty of researchers from universities.

In this exposition of very robust and specific traffic simulations, MÄK's web-based traffic simulation, TurboTraffic, is making quite a splash. The ability to quickly define traffic flows on the road network (provided in the cloud from OpenStreetMap), assign a volume of traffic, and then immediately see cars flowing into intersections is causing people to think of new applications. This "quick sketch" style lets non-experts create traffic where they previously would have hired a traffic consultant or simply gone without.

I recently found I could use WebLVC as helpful tool in the process of building a terrain database. I have been developing a terrain database for use in our VR-Forces and VR-Vantage demos at I/ITSEC. A good portion of that work involves populating the terrain with feature details such as trees, streetlights, fire hydrants, etc. On a given street corner, I need to make a number of decisions about what features to add to the terrain. Is there an office building there and how tall should it be?  How many trees are planted out in front of the building? Is there a streetlight on this corner? Given that I start out with 1 meter/pixel satellite imagery, I simply don’t have that information available.

It turns out that Google Earth has the detailed information I need in its Street View mode. In Google Earth I can fly to a particular street corner, and if Street View data is available at that location, I can get a photographic panorama of the terrain at that location. Now I just need to fly around to the correct location in Google Earth, look at the buildings and vegetation, and compare it with a view of the same location of the terrain I’m building in VR-Vantage. I have a way to see the actual terrain detail from Street View, and let it inform me as to where to create those details in the terrain I’m building. 

G’day! Last week VT MÄK, along with our technology partner’s Simulation Solution Australia (SimSol) and local reseller JM Computing, attended and exhibited at the Land Warfare conference that was held at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre in Melbourne, Australia.

Land Warfare Conference (LWC) is a major event for users, providers, academics, designers, and manufacturers to meet, present, share, and exchange new and visionary ideas in Land Systems and operations.

While VR-Exchange has always supported DIS and HLA through the RPR FOM (multiple versions), this year MÄK is making a concerted effort to broaden our support for other commonly used FOMs and protocols.

To this end, we have recently added several new brokers to support FOMs used extensively by the US DoD. We have started with a broker to support the MATREX Federation. We currently support MATREX version 7.x, but will upgrade to version 8.0 when it is released later this year. In the past we have had limited support for MATREX via a FOM Mapper plug-in. While this limited approach worked, we believe it was not very robust. All new translation to the MATREX FOM is done through a new stand-alone broker, offering robust and MATREX-specific translation options. Additionally, we are pleased to announce support for the Joint Land Component Constructive Training Capability (JLCCTC) Multi-Resolution Federation (MRF). We will also begin work on JLCCTC-Entity Resolution Federation (ERF) support in the coming months.

Recently the Africa Aerospace and Defence 2012 Air show was held in the South African Waterkloof Air Force Base in Centurion City of Tshwane, South Africa. The Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), a MAK customer, exhibited and presented VR-Vantage and the Hawaiian database provided by VR-TheWorld Server as part of their helicopter simulator in the CSIR booth exhibits.

Steve Haselum, CSIR, Systems Engineering Manager, commented on the event: “Back in the office now but after a successful Africa Aerospace and Defence 2012. The helicopter simulator system was certainly a crowd puller...there was quite a lot of interest in both the visual and database.”

Last week, VT MÄK, along with our Brazilian regional representative OpenCadd, exhibited at SIGE XIV 2012. SIGE is an annual Symposium of Operational Applications in Areas of Defense and is an international event in its fourteenth edition.

This event was hosted at the Technological Institute of Aeronautics – ITA facility in Sao Jose Dos Campos, Brazil. ITA is also the location and research center for the C4I lab where VR-Forces and complementary MÄK software are installed and used regularly.