Digital Realms delivered eight ground vehicle simulators to the Montana National Guard as part of an ongoing effort to upgrade existing simulators. The installed simulator group consisted of 5 M2 Bradley simulators and 3 M1 Abrams simulators. Both types of simulators were built using existing metal framework structure for the vehicle compartment, SVGA monitors for each vision block, and realistic grips for controls. Each simulator was then upgraded to use the BattleStorm™ reconfigurable simulation software created by Digital Realms and was integrated with MetaVR's Virtual Reality Scene Generator (VRSG™) visualization software. All simulators were networked together to provide a full CAV unit maneuver training solution.
Each computer rack consists of a single host machine and five (M2 configuration) or six (M1 configuration) visual computers. The host machine consists of two Pentium III 600 Mhz processors and 512 MB of RAM with an Ultra ATA-66 hard drive. Each visual machine consists of one Pentium III 800 Mhz processor and 256 MB of RAM with an Ultra ATA-66 hard drive. The racks also include two surge suppressors, a keyboard/video/mouse switch, and a 10/100 network hub. All equipment was bought off-the-shelf and assembled in the Digital Realms facility.
These snapshots show the database that was delivered to the Montana National Guard for their training. It is a 60x60 kilometer area of the National Training Center generated from DTED Level 2 elevation data and 2 meter geo-specific imagery including geo-specific cultural features. The COTS computer systems that were delivered are able to run the simulation on this database at greater than 30 frames per second, which exceeds the original systems. This also includes full screen anti-aliasing at a resolution of 1024x768 using Voodoo5 5500 video cards.
