The IMAGE Society, Inc.

NOVEMBER 2011

IMAGE OF THE MONTH

courtesy of

TERRASIM

Modeling, simulation, training, and mission rehearsal activity have evolved to support combined arms and unit training with federations of disparate simulation runtimes. The challenge for environmental generation is to support fully correlated and detailed content across both traditional visual and constructive simulation and rapidly emerging serious game runtimes.

The technology challenge is in representing detailed geo-specific content in each of the runtimes. It is no longer sufficient to simply produce a single visual output to be loaded into each simulation. Content correlation requires addressing the specific object and model representations in each of the runtimes. TerraTools® achieves correlation by compiling geospatial source data into a common intermediate representation, preserving source data attribution, and then exporting the environments using runtime-specific processing.

In this composite IMAGE of the Month, TerraSim illustrates the ability of TerraTools to produce a complex correlated "Terrastan" database for three serious game systems. Currently supported games and game engines include Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2), Steel Beasts Professional, and Havok Vision with others under development. Each database contains detailed urban content including buildings with interiors and automatically generated walls and roads in the games native runtime format. An overview of Terrastan showing the mountainous area surrounding the operational area is shown in the Havok's Tools Viewer, which can be used to validate complex content prior to loading into the Havok Vision Engine runtime.