Defense / Military Virtual Terrain

• The Defense Industry was among the earliest to recognizes the importance of virtual terrain, from as early as the 1970s.
• The Modeling and Simulation Coordination Office  (M&S CO) is a central node of US terrain projects
• U.S Navy SIMDIS
  • a project of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC
  • a set of software tools that provide 2D and 3D interactive display of live and post processed test and simulation data, including terrain, vehicles and ballistics
  • in military lingo, SIMDIS is government off the shelf (GOTS) software
  • has a large number of users throughout the U.S. DOD
• White Sands Missile Range's RAGE
  • 'Real-Time Advanced Graphics Engine' visualizes the terrain around a missile test before, after, and even during the test
• VMASC Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center
  • a curious academic/military/non-profit hybrid organization, which does a wide variety of modeling and simulation projects, some of which include terrain visualization
• U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center's (TEC) [http://www.tec.army.mil/] had an excellent page of Terrain Visualization Resources, although it was offline as of 2005; another revision of their famous "Commercial Terrain Visualization Software Survey" was revised as late as 2008, but then it too disappeared

Off-the-shelf

• VBS2 (Virtual Battlespace 2)
  • One of several "serious games" packages that are based on technology from the gaming industry, but adapted to the needs of military training/simulation: battlefields, scenarios, land, sea, and air vehicles, command and control.
  • Price: ($?) negotiated per license; generally locked by a dongle.
  • Claims to support "moving trees and grass, ground clutter, ambient animal life, shadows, dynamic lighting, weather and time of day".
  • As of 2011, there is reportedly still some difficulty in importing real-world data into VBS2, perhaps due to the lineage of the software from gaming rather than geospatial.

Commercial and Non-governmental

• There are a growing number of people adapting terrain visualization from the Games field to Defense-related uses.  An example is Breakaway Federal Systems which has a history as a game producer but now splits their operation between the game and "serious game" markets.  They claim some cutting edge terrain capabilities such as "generation of accurate, synthetic urban environments within 24 hours using satellite data" and "geospatially accurate, highly detailed visual simulations of 3D aquatic environments."
• iMOUT, an Autodesk product that unites CAD, GIS, BIM (building information modeling) and 3D visualization technologies (as of 2007)
  • Not yet explicitly mentioned on the Autodesk Geospatial Business Unit site
  • Very much recognizes virtual terrain as a convergence: "It's different from [MS] Virtual Earth or Google Earth, [The building] is a BIM model. The elevator shafts could have come from a mechanical program. The road data could have come from a civil engineering application. Other data could have come from CAD, GIS, 3D city models and subterranean utility infrastructure data."
• SRI's Automatic Population of Geospatial Databases program (1997-2000)
  • "The uses for high-resolution, geospecific 3-D site models are rapidly increasing – fueled by dramatic advances in computer graphics and simulation.  The missing piece is the technology for creating 3-D models without the need for significant human interaction."
• defense contractor Alphatech had a Dynamic Database (DDB) project
  • "Advanced geospatial representations that describe uncertainty. Advanced data association algorithms that derive correspondences between varying geometric descriptions of complex terrain regions. Approximate Bayesian net inferencing algorithms for geospatial reasoning."
• Historical AIS Terrain Team (later AIS) Virtual Cities (around 2001)
  • producing city models, "currently being developed under a Department of Defense contract for training of the Military's Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams and are also being provided to selected organizations in the civilian First Responder community."
  • they don't say much about how they produce their models, but they do start with raw GIS layers and use a combination of automatic and manual modelling

Simulation

• Historically, the Defense Industry has a simulation standard, DIS (Distributed Interactive Simulation)
  • "The primary mission of DIS is to define an infrastructure for linking simulations of various types at multiple locations to create realistic, complex, virtual "worlds" for the simulation of highly interactive activities"
  • Sadly, the IEEE DIS standards documents were only available through purchase.
  • DIS/x from Web Simulations, Inc.  is a C/C++ binding of the IEEE 1278 DIS protocol for UNIX and Windows, free and available in source code
• HLA (High-Level Architecture) is a bigger set of standards, going beyond DIS
  • CERTI is a free library (GPL) for HLA distributed discrete event simulations.
• as of 2005, the latest acronym is TENA (Test and Training Enabling Architecture) which people must now struggle to support in addition to DIS and HLA

Formats

• the military Vis-sim world has a huge number of files formats which are generally complicated, poorly documented and not widely supported, some of which are intended for terrain data
• historically developed for use in the ModSAF simulation project, the CTDB (Compact Terrain DataBase) format was widely used but not widely supported in commercial terrain database tools due to its relative complexity
• ModSAF (modular semi-automated forces) was obsoleted by OneSAF Test Bed (OTB) in 2001
• Eventually this evolved into the OneSAF Terrain Format  (OTF)
  • OTF 4.0 in 2009 suddenly leapt to OTF 8.0 in 2010.  It is generally supported only by high-end Vis-sim software such as those from Presagis