MÄK Products & Toolkits

VT MÄK develops commercial off-the-shelf tools and toolkits for distributed simulation. With our software you can link, simulate, and visualize your virtual world. Our products fit into your existing simulation infrastructure and our toolkit approach provides a platform for your innovation. Used together or individually, our products provide a strong foundation for your simulation system.

Link

Linking Your Distributed Simulations

VR-Link®: VR-Link is a powerful software toolkit that helps you make your simulations compliant with industry standard interoperability protocols. When you write to our protocol-independent API, your applications become natively compliant with DIS, HLA 1.3, HLA 1516, and TENA. Code generation tools and a FOM-Mapping architecture make it easy to tailor and extend your applications to support custom HLA object models.

MÄK RTI & RTIspy®: Every HLA federation needs an RTI to communicate. The MÄK RTI is a battle-tested and high-performance solution, used in a wide variety of programs and large exercises, including ― US Air Force Joint Strike Fighter program, US Air Force Distributed Mission Operations, NATO’s First

WAVE exercise, US Navy DDG 1000 program, Canada’s Department of National Defense War in a Box program, US Marine Corps Tactical Environment Network, Netherlands’ TACTIS program, and the Australian Defence Simulation Office Joint Simulation Capability program.

The MÄK RTI makes network configuration easy: Through a simple GUI, you can automatically discover and connect to RTI Execs running on your network, set commonly used connection options, and even remotely launch RTI Execs. The web-based RTIspy GUI helps you monitor the RTI, and diagnose network and connectivity issues. The RTIspy API allows you to build plug-ins to alter, extend, and query any aspect of the MÄK RTI’s functionality.

VR-Exchange®: VR-Exchange is a universal translator for distributed simulations. It performs FOM-to-FOM transla- tion, RTI-to-RTI bridging, DIS or HLA-to-TENA translation, and can support simulation-to-C4I interoperability.

Interoperability

MÄK’s products are designed around the concept of interoperability. All our tools are built on our VR-Link networking toolkit, making them natively compliant with DIS, HLA 1.3, and HLA 1516.
MÄK is committed to publicly available, publicly developed, open standards. We are active members of standards development committees, so you can be confident that our products will keep up with tomorrow’s standards, while maintaining compatibility with today’'s.
Our products are designed to work together, but can easily be used by themselves because they don’t rely on proprietary protocols. Being built on open standards means our products will also interoperate with other military protocol compliant COTS tools.

Flexibility

Our products fit the way you work. MÄK products include a wealth of out-of-the-box features, even integrated content from partners, like high-fidelity human characters from Boston Dynamics DI-Guy. Users can navigate terrain, set up scenarios, and adjust parameters through intuitive GUIs. We include GUI interfaces to customize models, tweak terrain, and set parameters.

But each of our products also has a C++ API so you can move a level deeper to customize or extend our products to meet your needs, or embed them into your own applications. Our architecture never constrains your design, and our out-of-the-box feature set never limits your ability to innovate and add value.

We develop our products so they fit the way you work. That means you can use one product or all our products to develop your simulation without any performance penalties. And with our dedication to product flexibility, you know that we’ll work with the data you have, from protocols to terrain.

Simulate

VR-Forces®: VR-Forces is our complete simulation solution Ά a powerful and flexible environment for generating and executing battlefield scenarios. VR-Forces is flexible enough to serve as a threat generator for training or mission rehearsal systems, to provide a synthetic envi- ronment for experimentation, or to stimulate C4I systems.

An intuitive GUI allows non-programmers to build scenarios by placing icons on a map, or by directly manipulating models in a 3D scene. Entity and aggregate editing tools let you configure simulation models, and define units and formations. For those who need to extend or customize the VR-Forces CGF or integrate VR-Forces functionality into custom applications, a full C++ API is available. Through the API, you can add custom dynamics model, implement new behaviors, model new sensors, and much more.

B-HAVE®: The B-HAVE Module for VR-Forces (Brains for Human Activities in Virtual Environments) leverages advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to provide more complex and realistic behaviors within MÄK’s VR-Forces simulation environment. Using B-HAVE, VR-Forces entities can analyze terrain topology, intelligently navigate through complex urban environments, automatically plan and follow paths through 3D building interiors, dynamically avoid collisions with obstacles or other entities, and flee from threats. The B-HAVE Module is powered by the Autodesk Kynapse Toolkit from Autodesk.

Support

We back our products with expert support, giving you a partner in your corner to help you succeed. All of our products have extensive documentation including a comprehensive developers guide. We like to cultivate what we call an “engineer-down-the- hall” relationship with our customers, so that they are as comfortable speaking with our engineers as they would be with their own co-workers. When you contact MÄK for support, you’re talking to the engineers who developed the products. Like members of your own team, we’re committed to doing what we can to help your project succeed ― whether that means suggesting the best ways to use our APIs, sending out rapid-response patches, or developing workarounds when schedules are tight.

Visualize

VR-Vantage™: MÄK’s 3D visual solution includes 3 powerful components.

MÄK Stealth: MÄK’s 3D information station. Whether you need it for situational awareness, simulation debugging, or after action review, the MÄK Stealth provides the most data about your networked virtual world, and presents it in a clear and accessible way.

Vantage IG: For those who need an out-the- window (OTW) scene or a view from a remote camera, VR-Vantage includes Vantage IG — the configurable desktop image generator. Vantage IG is designed for easy integration into desktop trainers and war gaming simulations.

VR-Vantage Toolkit: Developers will enjoy the VR-Vantage Toolkit ― a platform for 3D innovation. The toolkit comes with all the software you need to completely rebuild the visual applications like the MÄK Stealth or the Vantage IG, but it also allows you to customize and extend these applications to fit your unique requirements. It gives you the power to embed any of the MÄK Stealth or Vantage IG capabilities directly into your simulation applications. And because the VR-Vantage Toolkit is based on Open Scene Graph, you can leverage value-added plug-ins built by the OSG community and MÄK partners.

MÄK Plan View Disiplay: The MÄK Plan View Display provides a 2D view to increase your awareness of the virtual battlefield. By overlaying HLA or DIS entities and information onto 2D views of tactical, strategic, and visual databases, you gain new insight into the simulated battle.

MÄK Data Logger: MÄK Data Logger is an easy-to-use system for capturing and replaying simulation data. Using the intuitive GUI, you can record HLA or DIS messages to a file and replay them to review and critique simulation exercises. The Data Logger provides standard DVR-like features including pause, fast forward, and slow motion (both forward and reverse), to create more effective demonstrations and analysis. Simulation data can be automatically exported to an SQL database for data mining and analysis.