Development of an Urban Warfare Virtual Environment

The fundamental issues in the first Phase of this project are the real-time computation, rendering, and propagation of weapons effects and interaction of the propogated effects with personnel and buiding structural integrity. While the terminal effects of many weapon systems are well established, propogation of the weopon effects environment to a target, the resulting target interaction and response tend to be computationally intensive. these issues are exacerbated in a virtual world where weapon effects computations, modifications to the visual scene, and propagation of the resulting computations to other systems in a distributed interactive network must accomplish in real time. The objectives of the Phase I effort are fivefold: (1) Modify existing real-time MRC codes for conventional weapon effects; (2) Develop algorithms which describe generic building structural damage-response modes and post detonation configuration of structural elements; (3) Incorporate MRC ballistic casualty model; (4) begin visual implementation of algorithms; and (5) Develop a Phase II plan which implements items 1 through 4 in a DIS virtual environment.