MultiGen Officially Adopts the World Reference Model Entity Flight Specification

DIS Entity and Appearance PDUs are the communication mechanism which describes to a DIS simulation the change of state of other simulations or real equipment across a network within a DIS exercise. For man-in-the-loop simulators, part task trainers and stealth monitoring devices these PDUs are the control mechanism which determines the position, orientation and appearance of 3D model entities rendered by an image generator.

The World Reference Model Entity Flight Specification (WRM-EFS) describes the way in which these 3D models should be constructed such that coordinate systems, origins, articulations, markings, special effects and other appearance artifacts are consistent.

Models generated in compliance to the WRM-EFS may be loaded into any compliant DIS/visual rendering application. Once loaded the visual representation of an entity will be seamlessly updated from PDU data by the compliant application without requiring further application code.

Compliance with WRM-EFS provides a standard way of modeling which we would encourage customers interested in DIS, and others, to adopt. This will eventually provide a large library of models to the DIS community that can be rendered in a consistent manner.

The specification was developed jointly by M�k Technologies, Paradigm Simulation Inc. and MultiGen Inc. for the Warbreaker program under the guidance of Dan Brockway of SAIC, and significant contributions by many others. MultiGen's goals in officially adopting the WRM-EFS is to maintain and distribute the specification, promote its use, and assure compatibility with future changes in DIS standards.

The WRM-EFS is an open specification available to all interested parties. The creators of the specification encourage all to adopt the standard or, if this is not possible, adopt and publish a methodology which assures the same interpretation of the entity and appearance PDU.

MultiGen modeling tools can build models fully compliant with the WRM-EFS, and will further integrate this methodology within our tools in the future. M�k Technologies' Stealth product fully supports OpenFlight(TM): models built to this specification.

If you would like a copy of the latest version of the specification, you can download by double clicking the area below.

DIS Mission

The primary mission of DIS is to define an infrastructure for linking simulations of various types at multiple locations to create realistic, complex, virtual "worlds" for the simulation of highly interactive activities. This infrastructure brings together systems built for separate purposes, technologies from different era, products from various vendors, and platforms from various services and permits them to interoperate. DIS exercises are intended to support a mixture of virtual entities (human in the loop simulators), live entities (operational platforms and test and evaluation systems), and constructive entities (wargames and other automated simulations).

The DIS infrastructure provides interface standards, communications architectures, management structures, fidelity indices, technical forums, and other elements necessary to transform heterogeneous simulations into unified seamless synthetic environments. These synthetic environments support design and prototyping, education and training, test and evaluation, emergency preparedness and contingency response, and readiness and warfighting.