You're an infantry soldier climbing a steep hill. Your heart in pounding and your legs are getting heavy. At the crest, you crouch down and peer over the top of the hill. Your mission: seek and destroy enemy tanks.
No, you're not in Iraq. You're immersed in a virtual environment designed to test military equipment in realistic field conditions.
The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Aberdeen, Md., is using virtual reality (VR) technology from Division Inc. to develop a ground-simulation system for testing new weapons and equipment. The objective is to evaluate and refine equipment designs before developing physical prototypes.
The virtual environment includes both city and country scenes complete with enemy tanks and paratroopers. A high-resolution head-mounted display allows the users to become immersed in a realistic landscape. The variable resistance of a stair-stepper simulates different types of terrain. The user is armed with virtual semi-automatic and anti-tank weapons that are controlled by a 3-D mouse. As the user moves through the environment, they respond to enemy attacks. Three-dimensional sound is used to heighten the realism.
Division and ARL developed the application using dVise, an interactive authoring tool for creating virtual worlds. The system is driven by dVS, Division's virtual world operating environment.
The current application is part of an on-going development project. ARL's project team is working with Division to create multiuser environments in which equipment will be tested and manipulated interactively.
"We want to be able to incorporate a variety of weapons and equipment into an environment to run virtual field tests based on real-world data," Virginia Kaste, a computer scientist with ARL, said.
The challenge facing ARL and Division is making the system responsive to engineering and technical variables that affect equipment performance. How, for example, do researchers simulate the effects of armor-piercing ammunition based on variables such as distance and speed at impact ╤ all within a realtime simulation?
"We are in the early stages of developing the advanced features of the simulation, but we are beginning to get a handle on the complex computations needed to manage the databases involved," Kaste said. "Division's software is providing us with the flexibility we need to further develop the application."
ARL's application is pushing the envelope of VR, Doug Schiff, vice president of marketing for Division, said.
"Ground simulations are much more complex than most flight simulations. A realistic infantry simulation requires more textures, a greater variety of scenery, and a wider range of activities that must be tracked, processed and displayed in realtime," Schiff said.
When the simulation system is fully developed, infantry teams will be able to fight simulated battles using weapons and defense technologies that have not yet been built. An infantry team assigned to a new anti-tank weapon, for example, will be able to square off against a tank crew operating tomorrow's version of the M1 Abram tank. The lessons learned will be applied to improve both equipment designs and operating procedures.
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