Technology: Computer

VT MAK Successfully Completes Technical Assessment on the U.S. Army’s Synthetic Training Environment

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VT MAK supports soldiers conducting a recent technical assessment at the U.S. Army STE Technology Integration Facility in Orlando, Fla.


ORLANDO, Fla. (PRWEB)

VT MAK (MAK), a company of ST Engineering North America, today announced that it has successfully completed a programmatic milestone by demonstrating the core technologies that make up the U.S. Army’s Synthetic Training Environment’s (STE) Common Synthetic Environment (CSE), integrated with the One World terrain (OWT) and the Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainer (RVCT) devices. The technical assessment was the second of a series of program milestones in which MAK is making capabilities available to the Army for hands-on evaluation as part of an agile development process.

The CSE, developed by MAK, consists of the Training Management Tool (TMT) which enables soldiers to plan, prepare, execute, and assess training exercises, and the Training Simulation Software (TSS) which provides the simulation environment for the trainees as well as the simulation of the non-player characters.

At the assessment, MAK used vignettes to demonstrate progress against program requirements. Afterward, soldiers sat down with MAK engineers in a one-on-one setting to delve deep into specific capabilities.

Soldiers then independently conducted an end-to-end training exercise beginning with planning the exercise, assigning simulated entities to the hardware available, starting the execution of the scenario, recording the execution for After Action Review (AAR), and finishing with conducting the AAR with the training audience.

“Soldier touch points are critical to this development process as they ensure that the project is meeting the end users’ needs,” said Dr. Christina Bouwens, Deputy Program Manager, VT MAK. Warfighters participated as role players interacting in a common scenario on the Ft. Hood terrain controlling ground vehicles running on RVCT hardware through a hardware abstraction layer, and dismounted units using RVCT Soldier stations.

The TMT provided an intuitive, user-friendly capability that integrated unit training information with training readiness requirements, prepped and launched training activities, and drove assessment activities, all from a single workstation.

MAK demonstrated progress toward the longer-term scalability goals – including a cloud-based demonstration of VR-Forces integrated with Improbable’s SpatialOS framework; and an on-premise preview of MAK’s internally-developed scalability framework – managing and communicating with more than two million entities.

Integration with STE-related Science & Technology (S&T) technology was shown, including: The Leidos-developed Behavior Service for including authoritative legacy data sources and behaviors into the TSS and TMT; and The Augmented REality Sandtable (ARES) visualization capability demonstrating an augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) view of the simulation environment for collaborative training coordination.

The STE Common Synthetic Environment project continues to make significant progress, paving the way for a successful initial operational capability. MAK will provide another report after the next assessment in March, and will continue to be transparent about the process as it develops.

“STE is a transformative moment for the simulation world, the Army, and VT MAK. We continue making positive progress on this project by delivering state-of-the-art capabilities and support in a way that is consistent yet innovative,” said Bill Cole, President and CEO of VT MAK.

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ST Engineering North America is the U.S. headquarters of ST Engineering, a global technology, defense and engineering group specializing in the aerospace, electronics, land systems, and marine sectors. Based in Alexandria, VA, it has major operations across 17 cities in 13 states and employs about 5,000 people providing innovative products and solutions to commercial and government customers across diverse market segments.

VT MAK develops software for live, virtual, and constructive simulation. Built upon a strong foundation of COTS products, MAK delivers simulation, gaming, and networking technology in a flexible platform to meet the requirements of training system integrators, experimentation labs, and end users. Our primary users are in the aerospace and defense industries, yet our products and services can help customers anywhere modeling and simulation is needed to train, plan, analyze, experiment, prototype, and demonstrate. MAK is dedicated to serving our customers by building capable products, offering superior technical support, and innovating new ways to build, populate and view interoperable 3D simulated worlds. MAK continues to take advantage of new technologies that further the state of simulation. Our products help users link, simulate and visualize their world. VT MAK is a company of ST Engineering North America. Please visit http://www.mak.com for more information.

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