Vermont Air National Guard Airfield

The Vermont Air National Guard (ANG) has acquired 52 Virtual Reality Scene Generator™ (VRSG™) licenses to use in their F-16C training simulators. This brings the total to 84 VRSG licenses in use in four simulators at their site (21 channels per simulator). MetaVR™ has also built and delivered to the Vermont Air National Guard 3D terrain of the ANG base facilities and airfield at the Burlington International Airport, Burlington, VT.

	Real-time VRSG screen capture of a portion of the virtual VT ANG base and airfield. The building models are geospecific and the F-16 models markings match the airplanes allocated to this base.

About the database

The 6-geocell Metadesic-formatted 3D terrain, built with MetaVR's Terrain Tools for ArcGIS 9 is comprised of 47 GB of data of Vermont and upstate New York, with 60-meters post spacing, 1-meter imagery with a 0.5-meter imagery inset of the Vermont Air National Guard airfield and base facilities. The Vermont Air National Guard uses the terrain for F-16C simulation-based training.

	Real-time VRSG rendering of an F-16C entity taking off from the runway of the virtual Vermont ANG airfield. Click the image to swap daytime and nighttime views.

About the models

The virtual terrain contains approximately 45 high-resolution, geolocated models of hangars, offices, storage facilities, and other buildings in the area, a high-resolution F-16C aircraft model, and the runway. In addition, the virtual terrain includes the commercial air terminal, and approximately 40 other models of elements at Burlington International Airport such as runway lights, street light, signs, and trees. All site-specific models were created with textures derived from high-resolution photographs taken at the site, at ground level, with a 10-megapixel camera. The models were built with industry standard 3D modeling tools such as Autodesk Maya and 3D Studio Max. Content from MetaVR's 3D model libraries is also used on the terrain.

	Real-time aerial view in VRSG of the virtual Vermont ANG base and airfield, with Lake Champlain visible in the background.

	VRSG real-time view from a hangar on the virtual Vermont ANG base and airfield, featuring a high-resolution F-16C aircraft model.

For simulating night scenes, the terrain contains thousands of cultural light points of the airport and the Greater Burlington area. VRSG has an ephemeris model to predict moon position and phase, and populates the sky with a 40,000 light-point star field. The cultural lights, moon disk, and star field enable trainees in the cockpit simulator to fly the area at night with accurate celestial references and provide realistic stimulation of actual night vision goggles.

	View at dusk of the hangar shown above, from across the runway.

	Night scene of the commercial terminal at the virtual Burlington International Airport.

To geolocate many of the elements on the airfield terrain to match the ones on the actual airfield itself, an interactive panoramic view was created from photos taken at the site as a reference, using photo-stitching software. The panoramic view was then mapped onto a 3D cylindrical model, resulting in a 360 degree virtual view, or model, that could be examined as a reference for placing models on the terrain.

MetaVR Terrain Tools for ESRI ArcGIS was used to create the terrain mesh, which includes a high resolution representation of the Lake Champlain coastline. At runtime, VRSG Metadesic generates multi-textured, animated, normal-mapped water surfaces in the cutout regions identified as water. The terrain tiles seamlessly match with the water tiles generated by VRSG.

Shown below is a VRSG screen capture of the terrain tiles of the Lake Champlain shoreline, which seamlessly meet water tiles generated by VRSG. VRSG generates  multi-textured, animated, normal-mapped water surfaces are in the cutout regions identified as water.

	VRSG real-time aerial view of the virtual shoreline region of Lake Champlain. Click the image to swap rendered and wireframe views.

Actual and simulated views of the Vermont ANG airfield and base facilities

Below is a series of images of the Vermont ANG airfield and base facilities. You can compare actual photographs of the area on the left side with the VRSG screen captures of the simulated view on the right. The models of buildings and other structures are photorealistic; the models were created from a large set of high-resolution photographs of the Vermont ANG air base and the larger Burlington International Airport area.

Photographs of the VT Air National Guard airfield and base facilities.	VRSG real-time screen captures of  MetaVR's 3D terrain of the same area.

Click here to view real-time recordings of scenarios rendered in VRSG featuring this database and others. The media clips were made with VRSG's real-time recording feature.

This database is available free of charge to all US Government agencies and contractors (for official use only) and requires VRSG version 5.5 or higher.