Despite a significant drop in the prices of computer chips in recent
years, building advanced military simulators remains costly, because
most of the expense involves the development of digital databases,
said James R. Oyler, president and chief executive officer of Evans
& Sutherland Computer Corporation, in Salt Lake City.
“The cost of a simulator remains high, because mechanical
systems and software don’t follow Moore’s law,”
Oyler told an industry conference in Tysons Corner, Va. “Electronic
components are 10 to 15 percent of the cost of a simulator.”
Moore’s law is a widely used term in the industry to describe
the phenomenon by which computer processors become increasingly
more powerful and less costly within 18-month cycles.
Another reason why military systems are expensive is the low-quantity
orders, he said. The popular Sony PlayStation 2—a joint venture
of Sony and Toshiba—cost $100 million to develop, said Oyler.
“So you can only make it in that business if you have high
volume of sales.”
Some believe that a top-of-the-line video game, with Hollywood
production-style features is expected to cost $50 million. “You
can only justify that with high volume,” he said. The databases
are costly to build. For a PlayStation 2 quality of visual, the
database development price tag was estimated at $10 million.
A high-fidelity image database of the United States, at $480 per
square kilometer, would cost $4.3 billion, said Oyler. “For
ground, close-in training simulations you need more resolution.
... It bothers people to see fuzzy things. That is partly psychological.”
Terrain imagery is far more advanced today than digital representations
of buildings, bridges and roads, for example. “It’s
hard to get 3-D features correctly,” said Oyler. “They
are not as automated as terrain.”
One of the holy grails in the simulation industry is the standardization
of visual systems and products, so that they can be shared. But
that has been difficult to achieve in an industry that is highly
competitive. “The solution to standardization is to create
libraries of the desired objects and make them freely available,
such as models, 3-D source data, behaviors, tools, entire databases,”
said Oyler.
The use of commercial images, while less costly than custom imagery,
is “not a panacea,” he said. “Military needs are
not the same in simulators.”