Open, Collaborative and Connected at I/ITSEC 2021

Open and Collaborative

2 years of non travelling, of being virtualized, all of us in our parts of the World. We modified the formats of our humans exchanges and it was a fast and efficient adaptation. The evolution of the way we work, play and learn have accelerated like we never have seen before. After a very busy I/ITSEC where we all regrouped and compared notes, we realized that what we go through is more than a technology change. Actually both business models and policies are also being deeply reworked and reinvented.

Open solutions, community driven content, interoperability and terrain formats and standards are becoming easier to access and better integrated out of the box allowing new entrants to stimulate the entire community so it can reach the pace needed to deliver on the current and upcoming challenges.

CAE?invited us into a private demo of their new Prodigy image generator,?Unreal Engine-based, successor to their proprietary Medallion, for fighter and fast-jet training applications. The visuals are stunning at 4K and the company says the system will accommodate 8K. - Rick Adams, FRAeS, Editor, MS&T

What happened at IITSEC 2021 should not stay at IITSEC 2021

Lots of other stories came out during IITSEC and it could be a long list for this article. Halldale Media produced 3 synthetics articles organizing them by themes.

Unreal Engine Based Turnkey Solutions Presented at I/ITSEC 2021 - While game engines are powerful deployment platforms for many organizations, some end users want something that solves a need right out of the box.

Unreal Engine Integration Made Easy for Simulation Content - GIS photogrammetry, digital twins, and AI’s ability to assist in content reconstruction or augmentation are becoming even more important to the design process. The goal is to end up accelerating this creation pipeline.

Infrastructure/Deployment Solutions - These technology providers deliver seamless deployment solutions that ensure systems interoperability and bring the power of real-time training to even more locations or mediums.?

At Epic Games, we simplified the access to Unreal Engine, ensuring that everyone can access the engine without a barrier to entry. In parallel, we are reinforcing the ecosystems of our partners with third-parties - who are becoming a multiplying force - to serve the needs of the simulation community. While these companies are in different parts of the simulation and training industry market space, each has a vision that their developers can do a lot more if their tools allow them to blend real-time, realism, and accuracy all at once.

Iron Dev is stating our community values

The ingredients of this evolution we mentionned earlier in this post are given and expressed by our leaders and well synthesized in many sessions including when former Modeling & Simulation, Training Technology Branch Head NATO ACT Brian Vogt (now SAIC) listed them for the #IRONDEV contest values :

• Feasible (Not only planning ahead being applicable now)
• Suitable (Addressing the problem now as opposed to being a solution looking for a problem)
• Elegant (minimizes unnecessary?complexity)
• Bold (Demonstrates significant bold and innovative combination ?of tools)

I believe the four teams did just that during the contest. On top of delivering a great show on the last day the teams from Agenium and from the AFRL created the initial contexts to grow a next generation of solutions which will be distributed to the community in the future. Thanks to the IronDev contest their application will connect with new HL2 and Open DIS development teams.

Next steps and our commitment

We are motivated by the desire to build the absolute best game engine in the world.? We view our simulation community as a critical stimulator for that outcome, as you will push the engine in ways that other communities cannot. By using your feedback to temper Unreal Engine, we will ultimately forge a stronger development platform, with more content, and with a more vibrant ecosystem of users than we could achieve in any other way.

We will stay open, focusing on building incredible technology with strong open standards and integration, giving you the ability to focus on content.?

We will continue to make it cheaper and easier to achieve the highest levels of visual fidelity.

We will continue to develop partnerships to help you build solutions and to help us service the needs of others in this community.

And most importantly we will continue to be here, engaging with you and understanding your needs. - Nathan Thomas, Epic Games

I am excited to restate the words from Nathan Thomas from Epic and to share them again here with those we were not able to attend the Next Big Thing committee presentations.

You will see more coming from Epic Games to allow you to link the the virtual world and the real world, to blend them and ultimately to allow for better synthetic environment for Simulation.

More about Epic Games - Unreal Engine at IITSEC here