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 are pleased to announce the introduction of the Early Adopters Program for MÄK COTS software!

These days, MÄK is moving full steam ahead with some exciting features in our product line - be ahead of the curve and learn about these upcoming features before their public release. As a member of the Early Adopters Program, you’ll receive download links to pre-released software; this gives you the chance to provide critical comments about feature usability and direction that can influence a product’s final release. These releases will also help you better understand the direction our products are going with regard to new features.

I recently had need to compare to OMT files to see what would be required for bridging them using VR-Exchange.  Rather than doing it by hand, which would have most likely been a large waste of time and risked missing something important, I spent a few hours writing a tool that would compare two OMT files for me.

We are having a contest and giving away cash prizes (as well as a permanent VR-Vantage developers license) the most innovative demo's people create using VR-Vantage. Have you built something cool using VR-Vantage? Or maybe even a great scenario using VR-Forces that looks great when viewed with VR-Vantage applications like VR-Vantage XR?

I/ITSEC is a wonderful event. In the midst of displaying well tested solutions to customers and prospects, sometimes there is an opportunity to do a little on-the-fly integration. This is one of those cases.

Yesterday in the VDC Display Systems booth, which has a completely enclosed room, we tried out VR-Vantage generating four channels of video to make one seamless display.

Today we released VR-Forces Entity Boost Plug-In. This plug-in is one part of our initiative to support greater scalability for large exercises, 100,000 entities and beyond. To make this happen we are taking advantage of every piece of technology we can get our hands on : cloud-computing, HLA Data Distribution Management (DDM), multi-resolution modeling, multicast filtering, and multi-threaded design.

Just issued a press release about our recent efforts with Alion to use Battle Command to train the Latvian Armed Forces.

You can read the release here: http://www.mak.com/pr/pr_BC_Latvia.html

Here’s a recording of our new Force Projection demo premiering at our booth this afternoon. The scenario is built to simulate across the world as the blue forces track a terrorist cell.