MetaVR Upgrades Ft. Knox Systems

In 1999 a solicitation was sent to all of the major PC-based visual simulation hardware and software providers to invite them to participate in a six-month competitive flyoff to determine who would provide the upgrades of visual systems for the US Army, Ft. Knox ground vehicle simulators. After completion of the competition MetaVR was chosen as the image generator solution based on both price and and performance.

MetaVR rackmounted system coupled to the M1 driver and commander simulator shells.

In July 1999, MetaVR was selected as the winner in the Ft. Knox competition run by CCTT prime contractor Lockheed Martin Information Systems for the Army. The seven competitors in the flyoff were all given the same, dense terrain database depicting Kosovo as the basis for the evaluation. A video wall was constructed with each vendor's visual display simultaneously depicted for the evaluators. Each vendor's view could be simultaneously compared to each other for a given scene. Based upon this unique comparative evaluation, the US Army's Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM) and Lockheed Martin evaluated the MetaVR system to be the visual system solution for the Mounted Maneuver Battlespace Lab at Ft. Knox. MetaVR was both for the resolution of the displayed but also for the frame rate--the rate at which the visual display is updated. On average, MetaVR exhibited the overall highest frame rate for a given set of test scenarios. The existing CCTT visual systems operate at a fixed frame rate of 15 Hz or 15 frames per second. If you can maintain 60 frames per second during the simulation, as our system did, when the user moves around in the virtual world they do not perceive any lag or delay when his or her field of view changes. Simulators running at frame rates below 60 Hz will have a visual stutter as the user moves through the virtual environment at any appreciable speed. 60 frames per second is really key for high-quality, realistic visual simulation.

The SimNet M1 driver compartment and driver's vision blocks

Four of MetaVR's systems were installed on CCTT M1 and M2 simulators as a proof of concept. Lockheed Martin took components out of the CCTT software for the M1 and M2 and made simulation software that would run on a PC, a Linux machine that fits into the MetaVR's VRSG rackmount system to drive the visuals. As a result, at Ft. Knox there were M1 and M2 simulators using CCTT libraries for their simulation models that used MetaVR's visuals.

Later, the Mounted Maneuver Battlespace Lab at Ft. Knox selected MetaVR to upgrade the PC-based visual systems that it had bought previously from another supplier. To meet the higher performance requirements of its Battle Command Reengineering (BCR4) experiments, MetaVR rebuilt the Lab's computers and loaded its software into them.