Mass. Maritime Academy's Use of VRSG in Oil-Spill Recovery Training

In January 2002, Northeast Consulting Services, LLC (NCS) delivered a Crisis Management Training system to Massachusetts Maritime Academy (MMA), which included two VRSG workstations. This delivery was the latest in MMA's ongoing use of VRSG in their disaster recovery networked training program for government and industry resources who would participate in a potential oil-spill cleanup.

One of Mass. Maritime Academy's remote training clients is Prince William Sound Community College (PWSCC) in Alaska. In 1998, PWSCC purchased a remote node for their facility. Cost was a critical issue and as result MetaVR delivered two VRSG workstations to PWSCC and one to MMA; according to an NCS spokesperson, "this delivery was at nearly 1/6th the cost of SGI workstations". MetaVR modified VRSG to allow placing containment booms and oil-spill polygons onto a high-resolution terrain database of Prince William Sound built by MetaVR.

Prince William Sound is depicted in the image above with several ships off-loading oil. The imagery is 25 meter-per-pixel satellite imagery provided by Image Links running on the MetaVR VRSG real-time 3D rendering system . VRSG can maintain a 60 Hertz update rate with a 50 kilometer far horizon with NIMA Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED) Level 1 elevation posts on a MetaVR Efficiency System. VRSG can page both the terrain and 200 MB of imagery over the 206,000 by 198,000 kilometer terrain database without noticeable delays during the paging process.

In addition to VRSG workstations, MMA's Crisis Management Training system also consists of two instructor control consoles that provide 3D updates for all entities, the resource database, and the oil spill model. A LAN connects the consoles to the VRSG workstations at MMA and a firewall provides Internet access for remote training. In addition to multiple 17" LCD desktop workstations, the system includes a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, which is easily transported to client facilities for remote certification training of twenty or more students. Clients save substantial travel costs by having one or more members of MMA's staff bring a remote node to their facility for on-site training, or as in the case of Prince William Sound Community College, purchase a VRSG-based remote node (or an entire training system) for long-term cost savings.

Northeast Consulting Services is currently expanding the capabilities of MMA's Crisis Management Training system to include other casualty simulations, and is working closely with Mass. Maritime Academy to support their current and future casualty training requirements.

Images provided courtesy of Northeast Consulting Services, LLC, and Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and used with permission. © Northeast Consulting Services, LLC.Images were captured on a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with a NVIDIA GeForce2 Go-based graphics card.