Since its inception, Presagis has been hard at work at facilitating the integration of its technologies to simplify the creation of applications such as this one. With the recent integration of Vega Prime (our 3D Image Generator) and VAPS XT (our HMI Design Tool), all of the necessary capabilities are available to produce the application described before.
The combination of these two technologies allow users to create applications with much more functionality and produces results that exceed the simple sum of what each of these tools could do on their own. For example, a combination of Vega Prime and VAPS XT can be used to create a HUD (Heads-Up Display) overlay on top of a 3D scene that represents what the pilot sees in an aircraft. It can also be used to render digital instruments over the visuals for a ground vehicle simulator. Finally, with its interactive aspects, VAPS XT can be used to create a complete menu system that could be integrated inside of a Vega Prime scene.
The following video capture shows a Vega Prime application running with an embedded VAPS XT Overlay. The overlay is responsible for rendering the HUD as well as all of the interactive menus that are sliding in and out of view.
In order to arrive at this point, two new features from our products have been used. The first one is the new ability in VAPS XT v.2.3 to compile a display in a DLL form. These DLLs can be loaded in any OpenGL context to render their graphics. To be sure that we do not disrupt the existing OpenGL environment, the DLL's rendering code does not do any buffer swapping and does not clear the screen.
The second new feature is the vpVAPSXT module that is available as part of the 2.2.1.1 patch release for Vega Prime. This new Lynx Prime module can be used to load the DLLs generated by VAPS XT, size and position them, then call their rendering mechanism at the appropriate time.
Both of these new capabilities, in Vega Prime and in VAPS XT, are available as part of regular product upgrades.
