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.

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.

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.

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.

This week, MÄK is in sunny Las Vegas for the AUVSI Unmanned Systems 2012 show. Sitting in the middle of one of the largest unmanned vehicle trade shows is a like sitting on the set of Wall-E, but with more robots. We're showing our simulated video solutions and how we can support experimentation and training for these systems. We teamed up with DiSTI this week to develop a ground control station that interacts with the simulation, controls the UAV, and receives data streams from the simulated UAV over MISB standards compliant protocols just like a real UAV would. 

If you're looking for a winning bet, come by the VT MÄK booth (#2911) and see how we can help you produce reliable training and experimentation platforms for your unmanned systems.

Last week, alongside my colleague Gary Schrader, I attended and exhibited at the AFCEA-GMU (the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association - George Mason University) C4I Center Conference in Fairfax Virginia. The conference consisted of various speakers with expert backgrounds presenting topics consisting of C2 Integration Operations, Research Testbeds, Cyber networks, and C4I cloud computing, to name a few of the topics and papers. 

Dr. Michael Hieb, Research Professor of George Mason University, presented the C4I simulation based environment for Concept Development and Assessment developed on VR-Forces.  His research group also exhibited and demonstrated with their Brazilian partners ITA (Institute Technology Aeronautics) their joint collaboration solution based on VR-Forces. 

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.

VT MÄK presented its ISR Lab demonstration at the 2012 Feria Internacional del Aire y del Espacio (FIDAE air show) in Santiago, Chile. We actually brought two ISR Lab set ups - one for the Latinmedia booth (our reseller in South America) and the other for the Centro de Modelacion y Simulacion (CEMSE) of the Chilean Army. The demonstration was customized to run a new scenario which takes place on a terrain database based on Antofagasta, Chile.

In the Latinmedia booth, the ISR Lab was being shown on a gigantic screen provided by Screen Innovations. The individual channels were arranged using a MediaWall from RGB Spectrum and then projected by two projectors from projection design.