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 weather in Atlantic city is definitely IFR conditions ("Instrument Flight Rules" - or for us recovering army helicopter pilots, "I Follow Roads"). There's zero visibility and clouds all the way down to the surface. I'm not the least bit worried though, I'm at the Air Traffic Controller's Technical Symposium with a large number people who are used to landing aircraft of any size in these conditions.

Earlier this month, VT MÄK, alongside our corporate partner DiSTI Simulation, held the regional Asian Resellers Conference in a Songdo, Korea - a small town nestled in the hills located just outside of Icheon.  The event was well attended by distributors who came as far as Australia, India, Singapore, and Taiwan to our local distributor in Korea.  We welcomed over a dozen resellers and 30 attendees, each representing their respective regional companies and territories. 

During the two-day event, the attendees were exposed to the latest product technologies of VR-TheWorld and the entire suite of Simulation, Visualization, and Interoperability products, as well as DiSTI’s HMI tools such as GL-Studio, Replica8, and corporate roadmaps. The event was a great success and we hope to see everyone at the next resellers meeting scheduled to be held in Singapore.

Okay, you’ve all seen the hype generated about our new streaming terrain capabilities. You’ve all heard how we built this terrain using a combination of raw source data and some small amounts of hand modeled elements. Recently we put together a really simple video showing off Oahu, Hawaii. Here it is.

The video is long - it's 28 minutes long to be precise. Even though it only covers a small area of the island, you may not want to watch the whole thing. If you are thinking of fast-forwarding around, here are some highlights to check out. I will organize my tour by timeline so you can jump around and notice the effects.

VT MÄK is pleased to announce the release of VR-Vantage 1.4.1. This release marks another milestone in our Open Streaming Terrain story by adding the visualization of streaming vector data.  VR-Vantage applications (like VR-Vantage Stealth or VR-Vantage IG) can now stream in point, linear and areal features from a compliant terrain server using the open standard Web Feature Service (WFS) protocol, and use those features to generate textured 3D geometry on-the-fly at run-time.  VR-Vantage applications can:

• Generate 3D geometry for buildings, fences, and walls by extruding polygons from geo-specific footprints (linear or areal features), and applying geotypical textures based on feature attributes
• Place pre-built 3D models representing trees, geospecific buildings, lampposts, etc., into the scene based on the locations and attributes of individual point features (“point feature substitution”)
• Automatically populate forests with trees, or populate roads with telephone poles, fire hydrants, etc., by randomly placing 3D objects within areal features, or along linear features.

Combined with our existing support for streaming elevation and imagery, these new capabilities allow you to very quickly visualize 3D environments that are both global in scale, and visually rich:  Just upload your source data to a compliant streaming terrain server such as MAK’s VR-TheWorld Server, configure your feature-to-geometry mappings using an XML-based “.earth file”, and tell VR-Vantage to connect.

When we released VR-TheWorld, we weren’t sure if the defense M&S community was ready for open streaming terrain - distributed interactive simulation has such a strong dependence on correlation. So making a terrain database that runs in all the systems and meets all the requirements is a big job. Not all systems are capable of on-the-fly terrain creation from terrain servers, like VR-Forces and VR-Vantage.

Lately, we are beginning to see more and more use cases for streaming terrain servers in the early stages of large projects. By hosting the GIS data, the foundational data layers (elevation, features, imagery), on a streaming terrain server, project teams are able to start simulating immediately. They can use the terrain agile VR-Forces to plan and execute scenarios months before the terrain databases are even built.  And because VR-Forces and VR-Vantage are terrain agile, they can switch to using the static terrain databases when they are finally delivered. Customers are finding that some simulation tasks are started and finished on the open streaming terrain without the need for a static database build.

With the release of VR-Vantage 1.4.1 comes the ability to visualize streaming features from Open Streaming Terrain Servers like VR-TheWorld. Check out the hundreds of thousands of buildings and millions of trees being served up on our Hawaii database. The island of Oahu has been chosen to demonstrate this capability and all you need to visualize it is a VR-Vantage application and an internet connection. 

Use any VR-Vantage application like VR-Vantage Stealth or VR-Vantage FreeView. Connect to our online VR-TheWorld Server (when the app starts a terrain chooser dialog appears with "VR-TheWorld Online - MÄK Earth.earth" already selected. Just click OK). Load a "saved view" to bring you directly to Hawaii (Observer Saved Viewe Panel -> Import and Replace Views -> Choose "hawaii-boston.osrx". Click on "Hawaii").

This week I am exhibiting at ATC Global 2012 in Amsterdam. There are 5000 attendees and 200 exhibitors here focused on Air Traffic Management - more specifically, the next generation Air Traffic Management systems being built in the US and Europe. 

So far, theres been lots of interest in our visualization and simulation interoperability solutions. I've seen several booths use Google Maps as an interim visualization tool because they didn't realize that there is a more flexible option - VR-TheWorld and VR-Vantage. 

Today I wanted to give you another glimpse of some technology which is coming to MAK products like VR-Forces and VR-Vantage: streaming feature data.

Future versions of VR-TheWorld server will be able to load and stream geospatial feature data, including VMAP, .shape, and S57, among others. There are many applications for streaming feature data, but one of the better ones is to use to to generate richer terrains from raw source data. Currently VR-The World, VR-Vantage, and VR-Forces support streaming imagery and elevation source data. Adding streaming feature data will allow for the automatic extrusions of buildings and the placement of line, point, and areal models on top of the streamed imagery. It means when you walk off your embedded hand modeled open flight terrain (See Blog “How to get your terrain embed”), you will still be in a 3D world full of fairly rich objects.

Okay, the title this week was a little weak, it was an attempt at a good pun on par with the Economist’s discussion of the S&P Downgrade: “Substandard & Poor: AAAaaargh! (www.economist.com/node/21525898)”. Sorry…

As many of you know, MAK’s vision of the future of terrain is a combination of live streaming source data coupled with high resolution insets. The idea is, you still need to obtain (or create) high fidelity terrain databases largely by hand. However, the technology to generate moderate fidelity terrain from streaming source data (imagery, elevation, and feature data) is getting better every day. So, the world you want is one where the hand generated terrain is smaller and smaller and well blended with the source data providing the rest of the world. In this world you may generate a DB for your base of operations, and a DB for the area where you will insert after a helo to fight. However, the space between the base and the extraction point will be procedurally generated to appear to be high fidelity from the perspective of the helicopter. Such blending should let you go from space to someone’s dining room table. In the three pictures below we embed the hand crafted OpenFlt DB “VR-Village” into the broader world as supplied by VR-The World (VR-TheWorld.com) (Yes, the transition is smooth and beautiful).