DTB: What are some of the new technologies you're applying to future training and simulation systems?

Delisle: When you look at training needs and gaps we're focusing on filling, there always has been a need and desire for distributed mission operations training — everything is joint these days. The technology has made it difficult to make that happen because you need to link a network of these different devices and training simulators together to make them look like they're all operating in the same physical space, interoperating at the same time, and experiencing the same experience. This is a complex problem because of the bandwidth of the network. Providing what is true interoperable training is a major challenge. Second, the desire is to train where you are. The conflicts have changed, and taking time to travel to a schoolhouse to train takes away from the efforts.

Finally, the desire to do more distributed and networked training where they are either in route or in theater is a very high demand on the customer side. They'd like to be able to train and rehearse the day before an operation. We've been focusing on the technologies that allow train-on-demand and train-where-you-are while still retaining the ability to experience that in real time and in an interoperable fashion. If you're engaged in the training exercise as a user or operator, wherever you may be, when you experience the experience and you're working as a team and somebody is in a different country participating in the exercise, you both need to experience it at the same time and see the same events unfolding in real time. That's a big deal for the Department of Defense, because that solves a major problem they face today.

DTB: You're also leveraging technology from the gaming community. How has that advanced simulating the "urban environment"?

Delisle: When we look at the future in terms of key technologies and you look at training capabilities today and where the customer really has gaps in current training, one of the major gaps that exists today is the ability to provide what's called a robust urban environment. Today's conflicts and the global war on terrorism have changed the traditional enemy. Today's enemy is not what it used to be and now everything is being done in a more urban setting where the threats are ill-defined and the enemies are unknown in a lot of cases. Historically, simulation and training have provided environments that have been focused on traditional warfare — fighting enemy aircraft or tanks in different areas. Now, it's in an urban environment, so the training environment has to incorporate a complex set of civilian activity with civilian vehicles, human forms, human behaviors, and crowd behaviors — all those things that you see in a complex urban environment have to be generated into relevant and effective training for today's warfighters.

The area we've been focusing on from a technology perspective is to take the technologies and provide that type of rich, complex urban environment. What's really enabling a lot of this is what's going on in the gaming community, which has very rich games that include a lot of special effects. It's not operating in what we call a real-time sense, but we've been able to take advantage of the underlying technologies that they use — graphics-processing technologies and physics-based processing technologies. So we've been able to take what's being pulled to the commercial market, where a lot of investment dollars are being spent, and we've been able to take that technology and apply it to the military side and create the kind of physics-based environment settings that we can apply to a real-time training system.

That's been key. We're getting ready to demonstrate and release some products in the next month or two that show these capabilities and the way training is being done today with new technology. We show customers the difference that can be realized in these complex urban environments.

If you look at homeland security and the initiatives they have, they face the same environment as military first responders. In the homeland security side, where firefighters, police, the FBI, or whomever is engaged in an urban environment, they are faced with the same kind of complex environment as the military. The same technology can be used for homeland security efforts. Those efforts tend to be joint operations, so the military is engaged on the civilian side. The key from a training perspective is how to create that realistic, complex, multidimensional, confusing environment.

Before, we could get away with just simulating different aircraft in the sky, and some ground vehicles or tanks, armored personnel, and anti-aircraft artillery on the ground. That was fairly complex on its own, but it really wasn't urban and there was not a lot of activity going on. Now you have to generate thousands of moving vehicles and crowds of people who will all respond differently to an incident or event. All that simulation in a complex environment gets very dense. In our problem space, all of this has to be done in interactive real time. So the processing to make this operate and respond in real time is a challenge. That's where the advent of the gaming technologies has really pushed it to a point where that realism is attainable.

For more information on L-3 Link Simulation & Training's capabilities, visit http://info.hotims.com/10970-522.