On a quick walk around the show floor here at ITEC 2012 in London, I was excited to see the number of partners and other product vendors demonstrating new integrations between their products and ours:

1) Antycip Simulation is demonstrating a new dynamic ocean visualization plug-in to VR-Vantage, based on their MyOcean3D technology.  This plug-in generates realistic-looking waves by using fast-fourier-transform techniques to generate a dynamic height field, encoding the height field in a texture, and passing the texture to custom shader code running on the GPU.  The shader supports vertex displacement both vertically (for crests and troughs) and horizontally (for curling and breaking wave tips).  In the demonstration, a ship simulated by VR-Forces bobs and rocks realistically on the waves.  This is accomplished through a dynamic form of "ocean clamping", where a simple physics model is run in VR-Vantage to offset the ground-truth positions and orientations published over HLA by VR-Forces.  The MyOcean3D plug-in to VR-Vantage is already in use at one customer site, and we are interested in hearing whether you'd like to see this become part of the standard product offering.

The next major release of VR-Vantage (1.5 coming out Q3 2012) will let users visualize radio communications. Users of VR-Vantage Stealth, VR-Vantage PVD and VR-Vantage XR (and eventually VR-Forces and SimMetrics) can tell who's sending radio messages by their "Squawks". You'll also be able to see who they're communicating with via "Radio Communication Lines". 

We just released VR-Vantage 1.3.1 with support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. It also comes with some great new capabilities like zoom and terrain scaling.

With zoom, you can magnify the view and see things that are far away without changing the observers location. This is useful for UAV sensor applications, ground based binocular views or even periscopes!