From: temerson@hitl.washington.edu
Subject: EPUB: U.S. Army Employs VR Applications for Weapons Design
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 11:48:30 -0700


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Subject: 9064 U.S. Army Employs Virtual Reality Applications for Weapons
Design HPCwire

U.S. Army Employs Virtual Reality Applications for Weapons Design  HPCwire
NEWS BRIEFS                                                  Sept. 8, 1995
==========================================================================

  San Diego, Calif. -- The U.S. Army Armament Research Development and
Engineering Center (ARDEC) is optimizing weapons design and effectiveness
by integrating virtual prototypes imported from Pro-Engineer CAD/CAM
software into virtual environments developed by GDE Systems via Division
Inc.'s dVISE virtual world authoring software.

  A turnkey system which includes Division's d/VS operating system running
on a Silicon Graphics Onyx workstation, a head-mounted display, motion
tracker and 3-D input device, allows users to become fully immersed in the
virtual environment as they interact with it in real time.

  Several weapons systems are undergoing virtual evaluation including the
Objective Individual Combat Weapon (OICW) and the M198 towed howitzer.
The OICW is a multi-purpose hand-held weapon being developed for ARDEC.
Its simulation lets a user interact with an urban scenario using a
stereolithography model, so that the weapon's effectiveness can be
evaluated and design flaws detected. The M198 simulation allows users to
examine various autoloader designs under battlefield conditions.

  The virtual testing environments are based on actual satellite and
reconnaissance data transferred into dVISE, so that the weapons can be
tested on simulated battlefields based on valid geographical
characteristics.

  "Division's systems give us a full spectrum of capabilities within the
fully immersive VR environments," said Mary Klement, an engineering
staff specialist at GDE. "We are especially pleased with the
user-friendly Motif interface, which allows applications and prototype
connections to be toggled on or off at will."

  The OICW and M198 simulations, along with others, will ultimately
become components of ARDEC's Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS)
node, allowing users to be immersed in a simulated battlefield using
hardware still under development, GDE noted in a press release.

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