A: VR-Vantage is MÄK’s 3-D visual solution. VR-Vantage has three components— the MÄK Stealth, Vantage IG and the VR-Vantage toolkit. We officially released the product in March, and we’ve received a great response, especially to the product’s terrain agility. VR-Vantage can load traditional hand-modeled databases in a variety of formats, but it can also read and visualize geographic information system [GIS] source data without conversion to a polygonal terrain format, and it can connect to Web-based servers for streaming elevation and imagery data. We’re talking about a whole new way of looking at terrain.

Q: MÄK has entered into partnering agreements with other community members. Please describe some of these recent partnerships.

A: One of the more recent trends in our partnerships is the growing importance of network-centric warfare [NCW]. Our most recent partnership is with Scalable Network Technologies, the creators of Qual- Net, a leading battlefield communications simulation package. We also have partnerships with AGI [creators of STK, a product used by space, defense and intelligence community professionals to model, simulate and operate Earth- and space-based systems] and OPNET [makers of 3DNV, which enables 3-D displays of OPNET network simulations]. With these partners we can offer more authentic battlefield communication simulations, a priority with the growing importance of NCW.

We also took advantage of our industry partnerships to make VR-Vantage a more complete solution for customers. We were able to work with Boston Dynamics to embed DI-Guy human characters into VR-Vantage. We leveraged our partnership with DiSTI to include a variety of vehicle interfaces from GL Studio. And the user gets these great capabilities without needing to do integration or buy additional modules.

Q: The draft FY10 defense budget emphasizes winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reducing investments in some high-ticket weapons platforms and systems. How is MÄK’s product portfolio configured to meet DoD’s near-term requirements?

A: The National Guard has been doing more with less for years. And we’re proud that they have made MÄK part of that strategy. The Air National Guard chose MÄK’s QuickStrike tactical desktop simulation and a suite of our [commercial offthe- shelf] COTS products as part of their training strategy for six U.S. Air Force Support Operations Center [ASOC] squadrons. Because of ease of use and configuration, each squadron had the capability to do mission qualification training, continuation training, and mission rehearsal whenever they have the personnel and time available. Lieutentant Colonel Scott Whitmore, the 111th ASOC commander from the Washington Air National Guard, has even said that their recent success while deployed is a reflection of the value of the capability QuickStrike provides.

Q: You continue to be a proponent of interoperability for M&S systems. Your thoughts, please, on the DoD/industry team’s recent efforts to promote M&S interoperability.

A: It’s a never-ending struggle against “the stovepipe.” Without high-level DoD interoperability proponents, our industry would regress into closed proprietary systems that could no longer interoperate. The recent effort by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to create a path forward for live, virtual and constructive integrated architectures [LVCIA] is an excellent and well-executed effort aimed at coalescing the exploding number of competing interoperability architectures. We believe that the study will clearly show that creating yet additional new architectures would simply exacerbate the problem. We also believe that the analysis will undeniably prove that having multiple competing COTS vendors costs the DoD vastly less, in total, than a single [government off-the-shelf] GOTS supplier of one architecture solution and simultaneously produces much higher quality products.

Q: Briefly highlight some of your company’s promising R&D efforts.

A: The terrain problem has been a huge focus for us. The things we learned from our GIS-enabled modeling and simulation [GEMS] R&D effort with the U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center helped us develop the terrain agility in VR-Vantage. The effort also produced a prototype of VR-Forces that could simulate entities on raw GIS data, eliminating the need to create special-purpose CGF databases. This technology enables VR-Forces to simulate on the exact same data used in C4I systems, making mission rehearsal and course of action analysis on up-to-date data possible. We also just recently won a follow-on contract to integrate the GEMS terrain libraries into OneSAF. The libraries can be integrated into many different constructive simulations, reducing the need for one-off databases and improving the correlation with C4I systems for a smoother transition from training to mission rehearsal. ♦

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