Requirements for realism and greater fidelity in simulation continue to grow to meet trainee needs. The complexity of large terrain database development is also escalating to meet these demands – as is the related time and effort to deliver them. As a result the investment it takes to meet user expectations for rich, correlated synthetic environments is becoming something that is difficult to manage.
Today, more than ever with budgetary and time constraints, there is a need to find ways to deliver databases in a more timely and cost-effective way. New methods must be found to make appropriate trade-offs that can ensure training needs are met and that will result in better ROI on projects.
A number of key challenges continue to stand in the way of project leaders:
Significant time is required to fine tune imagery and vector data correlation, to populate the database with 3D models, to process imagery and make color corrections, and to render and compute the database.
The costs associated with purchasing detailed imagery datasets to reach the level of visual accuracy expected by trainees is high. Also of concern is ongoing costs associated with maintaining databases and making necessary updates to ensure an immersive experience over time.
Database development effort required to generate vertex level correlation when working to correlate multiple databases with new formats and applications is a very complex and can limit success and reuse of databases.
It is now time to evaluate new approaches to utilize synthetic environment generation and leave behind traditional, costly methods associated with the manual manipulation, enhancement, and classification of geospecific data traditionally used in areas of your database that don’t require such data, hand coding of geotypical data, or use of airborne or satellite imagery and elevation data.
One new, innovative methodology is procedural modeling, or the use of vector and elevation data combined with procedural rules, textures, and models to construct a synthetic representation of the natural environment:
This approach outputs the synthetic representation of the natural environment in a format that can be used as imagery source in the development of offline terrain databases. The benefits of this approach include:
This approach constructs a synthetic representation of the natural environment in ‘RunTime’ as the client device needs to visualize the scene. No imagery is stored on disk with this approach. The benefits of this approach include:
Find out how Presagis is developing new technology to help break the boundaries of database development by clicking here.