MetaVR Visuals Used in Rapid-Fire Weapon Simulator

MetaVR™ has developed high-performance mission function capabilities in Virtual Reality Scene Generator™(VRSG™) to meet the requirements of rapid-fire ballistics weapon simulations. These capabilities provide simultaneous parallel ballistic processing that can be visualized across multiple synchronized visual channels while maintaining a 60 Hz frame rate. This visualization draws the trajectory of the rounds to include tracer effects on high–resolution geospecific terrain.

VRSG rendering of a scene featuring a Dillon M134D Gatling Gun mounted on a Special Operations MH-47G helicopter with an animated crew character. All models in the scene are from MetaVR's 3D content libraries.

Cubic's new rapid-fire weapon simulator uses MetaVR’s VRSG with highly parallelized mission functions processing, to drive the visualization of the round flyouts.

Cubic's rapid-fire gun simulation training system, called the M134D Virtual Trainer, uses MetaVR’s VRSG with highly parallelized mission functions processing, to drive the visualization of the round flyouts. Per Cubic Corporation’s press release of May 27, 2010, the new weapon simulator "replicates the characteristics of a Gatling-style gun, firing up to 3,000 rounds a minute." MetaVR’s technology has also been used in Cubic’s simulated small arms trainers Engagement Skills Training System (EST) 2000 Plus.

VRSG close-up rendering of the scene featuring a Dillon M134D Gatling gun mounted on an MH-47G helicopter and the animated crew character. All models in the scene are from MetaVR's 3D content libraries.

Typically the simulation host relies on the image generator (IG) for collision detection calculations for the ballistic rounds fired by the simulated weapon. Traditional image generators do not have the processing power to handle the collision detection requirements of modern rapid-fire systems, which can fire up to 50 rounds per second. Often the simulation is forced to only consider collision detection on tracer rounds, which gives a lower fidelity result.

MetaVR has developed high-performance collision detection mechanisms so that fidelity need not be compromised on such simulations. This performance is accomplished along two dimensions:

• Exploiting the capabilities of multi-core desktop PC CPUs, which are now commonplace: today's norm includes 4, 6, and 8 core variants of Intel and AMD processors. On a given IG channel, the MetaVR IG exploits this parallelism, resulting in a near linear speedup in collision detection performance.
  
  
• Intra-IG parallelism: Simulators often employ multiple IG computers for their visualization. The processing burden of collision detection can be distributed across multiple IGs when available. This results in another linear factor in collision detection performance.

For single IG channel environments, MetaVR offers a licensing option for the IG that enables multiple IGs to be applied towards collision detection, where such IG channels are not being used for visualization purposes. This essentially turns additional PCs into dedicated mission functions processing nodes, which cost 1/6th the cost of a full-featured IG.