Lockheed Martin Partners with Varjo

Lockheed Martin is partnering with Varjo for its visual simulation platform Prepar3D. Varjo is working with Lockheed Martin and the Prepar3D team to enable demanding training and simulation scenarios that require high-fidelity immersive displays.

Developed by Lockheed Martin, Prepar3D allows users tocreate training scenarios across aviation, maritime, and ground domains. Thenewly-released Prepar3D v5 brings new capabilities and features to solveemerging virtual and mixed reality training needs. It brings support forVarjo’s mixed reality headset, XR-1 Developer Edition. Prepar3D is alsocompatible with the VR-2 and VR-2 Pro. This opens up a range of new trainingapplications where the real and synthetically generated worlds can be blended tocreate training solutions.

“With the advent of the virtual reality technologies, we arealways trying to find ways to integrate with the latest and greatest tech intoour software,” said Kyle Myers, Software Engineering Manager at Prepar3D, in aninterview with Varjo. “Virtual reality and mixed reality are going to becritical for our next generation of trainers.”

With virtual reality, a key challenge is having the traineesinteract with the cockpit when they cannot see what is around them.

“If the visual acuity of the virtual environment is not goodenough, that impacts the training and ultimately is a negative experience,”said Myers. “When we use headsets such as Varjo, where the resolution of theheadset is much sharper and much closer to human-eye resolution, the experienceis much more natural. Using VR technologies such as Varjo allows us to create atraining experience with a wide field of view, without having the overhead of alarge dome or multiple LCD screens.”