SMARTT TECHNOLOGIES"TRY Before you BUY" Goes Hi Tech
DRDC Defence Scientist Rick Brown spends his days playing video games. Well almost ... Despite the fact that millions of parents decry the waste of hours and days that their teenage sons spend in front of military simulation video games like Counter Strike, the technology behind these games is making a contribution to our defence efforts.
Dr. Brown explains:
"The simulated environments which we use to test battlefield scenarios are very similar to entertainment products in that they contain three types of simulation models.
- Graphic models which control the 3-D look of people, objects, and the world in which they exist;
- Dynamic models which control the way in which the people and equipment move due to their weight and size within the simulations; and
- Behaviour models which control the way people and systems react to stimuli within the simulated environment;
Besides being useful for training, these types of models can be used to test equipment design concepts. For instance, we could hypothesize two types of control systems for controlling a tank, then predict which one will produce better results in the battle field by testing both cases using a synthetic environment.
Although entertainment games and military simulations share these types of models, there are significant differences. In an entertainment product, the dynamic model of how a tank moves only needs to be realistic enough to entertain the user. In a defence simulated environment, we use much more sophisticated models that will allow us to predict how the tank will perform in actual battle scenarios.
Similarly, in an entertainment product, you often have computer-controlled characters that make great adversaries to play against; however, their behaviour is rarely realistic. In our simulated environments, we are able to program more complex automatic responses of people and objects to the actions of the human-controlled characters and equipment.
Synthetic environments like these have the potential to revolutionize both the way we design equipment and the way we purchase it. For instance, if we create a simulated environment in which to test the performance of unmanned aerial vehicles then input parameters describing the performance of products provided by different manufacturers, we can determine the most cost-effective performer. All this can be done without purchasing actual products and can greatly reduce the number of options to be tested during real world field trials."
"A commercial video game can have $5M sunk into its development," says Brown. "By making use of the spin-off technologies such as gaming engines and graphical models, the Defence department can create some very sophisticated synthetic environments at moderate cost".
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