ARTICLE

November 2003

Digital Imagery Recreates Any Location on Earth

Simulator technology aids news coverage of war in Iraq, depicts events within hours

by Geoff S. Fein

Three-dimensional imagery increasingly is becoming an important training tool for the military services, fueling the demand for advanced graphics generators that can precisely replicate the geography of any region of the world.

An example of this technology is the Environmental Processor, developed by Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp., of Utah. The EP uses a combination of satellite, reconnaissance aircraft photos and other systems to recreate a virtual 3-D image of any location on Earth. The military system grew out of a similar program being used to train commercial airline pilots.

“War fighting has changed, and those changes demand that the military change the way it trains,” said Nick Gibbs, E&S Simulation Systems general manager.

The simulator can run on high-performance computers or standard PCs. This allows customers to tailor the system to meet their financial and training requirements, said Gibbs.

EP systems generate 3-D, textured environments that can be augmented with high-resolution imagery and terrain insets. Customized imagery includes cultural lighting at dusk and night, and geographical representations of coastline, cities, urban areas, mountains, agricultural areas and tundra, said Gibbs.

Other features include weather effects, rapid generation and insertion of airfields and high-fidelity terrain for missions requiring low-altitude flying.

E&S was awarded a three-year, $10.8 million contract from the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office of the Naval Air Systems Command. The contract, known as the “Rapid Database Generation Research Initiative,” calls for conceptualization, creation and testing of an architecture and process that will enable imagery and sensor data from disparate sources to be rapidly validated, correlated, distributed, and displayed in a standard format.

The technology got some well-publicized exposure when its EP-1000CT system was used by ABC News during reports in its coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The network used the imagery to show viewers actual events a few hours after they happened. EP not only depicts Iraq, complete with buildings and vehicles, but also other areas of the Middle East. It shows aircraft, land vehicles, ships and infantry involved in U.S. operations. The accuracy of an image is within two feet, said Gibbs.

ABC News had an exclusive agreement with Evans & Sutherland for the use of the EP technology. The company is negotiating with ABC affiliates to allow them to use the system to cover events in the United States and around the world.

The company has sold 20 EP-1000CT systems, the same as the one used by ABC News.

The technology isn’t new, said Gibbs. The concept has been used in other systems at Evans & Sutherland, for more than a decade. But it wasn’t until 2000 that the company applied the technology to develop its Environmental Processor.

“The development of EP represents a paradigm shift in the approach to the creation and update of training databases, but some elements of EP architecture have been part of our software approach for several years,” said Gibbs. “In addition, improvements in the availability of source data as well as [Evans and Sutherland’s] own image generation technologies facilitated the development of EP.”

One version of the system, the EPX-5000, is designed for military training and combines commercial off-the-shelf hardware with Evans & Sutherland’s in-house technologies. It was developed in response to a growing demand for simulations to help train for regional conflicts. Understanding that users needed to have the most up-to-date information reflecting the latest real-world conditions, the company designed the technology so it could be updated within a fraction of the time required—hours instead of weeks—for traditional software architectures.

The company now is beginning to receive orders for the EPX-500 simulator, which is targeted to military customers, and the EPX-50, a low-cost application that runs on a standard PC.

Evans & Sutherland is installing these systems on simulators in the United States, Australia, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

The company is also using EP-based products for strategic applications such as mission planning, preview and rehearsal; command and control visualization; battle-space visualization; damage assessment; and command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said Gibbs.

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