A Virtual Test Range for Real and Virtual Equipment

We propose developing a virtual reality environment for the testing of real and virtual equipment. The proposed testbed will leverage Cybernet's experience in building high performance robotic tactile feedback devices, combined with head-mount graphics generation and 3D-audio, to provide a standard VR environment for testing and evaluation of virtual and real prototype military equipment, components and systems. As an initial controlled experiment, a current fielded system will be selected and used to develop a virtual prototype which can be used to test and validate the VR environment. Part of this validation will be to evolve new virtual and real prototypes from this baseline system within the VR testing environment, thus to verify that the VR environment contributes to speeding both the engineering and reverse engineering processes. The goal of this effort will be to demonstrate the feasibility of such a VR testbed for specific military systems. The system will then have been proven to have the basic VR framework required for testing applications of various military systems.