Cloud Computing, VR/MR/AR and the Future of VBS

BISim continues with its well-laid strategy to evolve VBS. BISim’s Pete Morrison, Chief Commercial Officer, was interviewed by Halldale Group Editor Marty Kauchak.

“The VBS we have today is just fundamentally different,” Morrison told MS&T, than the first iteration released in 2004. One major waypoint on the VBS lifecycle roadmap was an effort, in 2013, to more heavily invest in software – “to provide fundamental capabilities that our customers were demanding, one of which was the whole-earth terrain environment, a global solution so they could train anywhere ‘out of the box.’” Indeed, Morrison reflected: “When it came to investments in the last eight years, it’s been about terrain, terrain, terrain, terrain. Every military organization around the world wants higher-fidelity terrain, terrain for the area they are operating in or for live operations – right now! Our new game engine [VBS Blue] would speed up the generation of, and increase the fidelity of, terrain used in military simulation.”

BISim’s persistent investments in the VBS Blue game engine and VBS World Server technologies have allowed it to remain central to the US Army’s evolving Synthetic Training Environment (STE) and its enabling One World Terrain (OWT), and the service’s Training Simulation Software/Training Management Tool (TSS/TMT) project.

Other post-2013 developments familiar to community members included the launch of the VBS Blue image generator, and the build of more-modularized architecture – of particular importance to military system integrators. “The next evolution for us will be this transition to the Cloud. Evolution will also occur in terrain management, based on the current BISim World Server – with our first Cloud-enabled product coming on line next year.”

BISim’s “secret sauce” for success has also included not having a specific terrain format. The CCO remarked, “We wanted to make sure our users could throw any terrain data of any fidelity at our World Server and stream it out to the connected run time – it could be VBS or Unreal. It’s really important, because BISim is working with multiple run-time engines beyond VBS.”

Another datum point on this part of BISim’s business model is VBS4 21.1’s inclusion of Microsoft Bing Maps global satellite imagery as another data source available to end users. VBS4 21.1 enhancements include bolstered environmental visuals, several of which are high-fidelity ship wakes, snow, surface moisture, and 3D tree visualization and detailed, interactive 3D models of vehicles and other articles.

Morrison was asked about the return-on-investment from its efforts in this part of the VBS portfolio. The community veteran pointed out BISim is faced with an entertainment space that is full of high-fidelity products. “We’ve had to invest in our graphics, sound and physics because there is this expectation from our trainees that a modern computer game, even one for military training, should look and feel at a certain fidelity – that is why we’re really investing in that. And there’s the marketing aspect. We’re compared to modern, first-person computer games. There’s the need to compete with that.”

As significant is the bottom-line requirement to add training value to a scenario – which may, for instance, be as subtle as learning to detect disturbed ground in an IED scenario.

The move to affordable, effective VR/MR/AR enablers for training is a theme of increasing significance through the military and adjacent high-risk training sectors. BISim’s VBS Blue image generator, designed for deployment on simulators, is the company’s focal point for its current VR/MR/AR work. The US Army is funding projects that take best-of-breed MR and AR headsets and integrate them with VBS Blue IG and deploy them on the new fleet of reconfigurable, virtual collective trainers for the Apache, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.

“We’re right there. Bohemia is fully funded by our customers to continue to support the latest VR/MR/AR technologies within the VBS rendering. Every year it keeps getting better and better. We’re proving to our customers that our software, our rendering engine, is more than capable of providing great outcomes.”

I/ITSEC delegates at the BISim booth will see a MR-configured Carl Gustaf weapons trainer and an AR-enabled Apache flight simulator.

Editor’s Note: The day of this interview,  BAE Systems released its announcement that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Bohemia Interactive Simulations (BISim). While Morrison said, from a personal perspective, “This was great news and we really do look forward to working with BAE,” he emphasized he was officially precluded from commenting on the acquisition’s details.