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.

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.”

When selling toolkits, we run into the same kind of problems that people selling hammers have. Most people won’t believe that the tool can build a house unless I show them a house built with the tool. With our software toolkits, many customers want to see the possibilities that the API is capable of. Because of this, many of the demos that we create have a touch of customization to them, some more than others. However, we always do it in a way that a customer can replicate when they are working with our APIs and we do it through the magic of plugins. Demos including dynamic terrain and video streaming are all implemented as plugins. (continued...)

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.

In VR-Vantage 1.5, we will be making some small changes to the Track History feature. Track Histories are currently limited in how long they can get. This is for performance reasons because, as you can imagine, creating infinitely long track histories will cause the application to run out of memory.

In 1.5, we will allow the users to specify the length of each track history segment and also the total number of segments allowed per track history. This lets you have longer track histories if you have fewer entities, for example. 

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").

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". 

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.