(While my title says VP of Sales at MAK, my roots run deep in engineering with decades of experience in modeling & simulation – I’m excited to share my perspective at the Summit!)

Let’s rewind. At the start of my career more than 30 years ago, I was fortunate enough to witness the birth of a new way to train soldiers and airmen by connecting disparate simulations together to form a collective training environment. The technical advancement stemmed from the development of the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) Protocol, which enabled simulators built by different companies using different technical solutions to interact within a networked virtual environment. DIS only applied to network traffic, but at the time, that was sufficient. Why was network interoperability enough? Well, because everyone shared the same hand-modeled database representing the environment. 

A lot has changed since the late 1990s, but nothing more than the advancement of terrain. Instead of using the same hand-modeled database, most simulations today use procedurally generated representations of the environment based on common source data.  As a result, soldiers and airmen get to train in beautifully realistic visual twins of the operational environment, mirroring the visual quality of the video games they play. While the procedural generation of terrain has been a great leap forward for our industry, it has made the interoperability piece a bigger challenge than ever. Simulators built using different visual engines may have roads and buildings in the same location, assuming they use the same source data; however, the same is not true for procedurally generated features, such as clouds or trees. Both play an important role in virtual training. 

So…what now? Come to my talk in Orlando on January 29th you’ll find out! (or check back for my next blog 😊). My presentation will be on January 29 from 10:20-10:50 AM.

Register for the Summit or download the agenda to see the full lineup.

Hope to see you there!