VT MAK Successfully Completes Technical Assessment

VT MAK, a company of ST Engineering North America, has successfully completed a programmatic milestone by demonstrating the core technologies that make up the U.S. Army’s Synthetic Training Environment’s (STE) Common Synthetic Environment (CSE), integrated with the One World terrain (OWT) and the Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainer (RVCT) devices. The technical assessment was the second of a series of program milestones in which MAK is making capabilities available to the Army for hands-on evaluation as part of an agile development process.

The CSE, developed by MAK, consists of the TrainingManagement Tool (TMT) which enables soldiers to plan, prepare, execute, andassess training exercises, and the Training Simulation Software (TSS) whichprovides the simulation environment for the trainees as well as the simulationof the non-player characters.

At the assessment, MAK used vignettes to demonstrateprogress against program requirements. Afterward, soldiers sat down with MAKengineers in a one-on-one setting to delve deep into specific capabilities.

Soldiers then independently conducted an end-to-end trainingexercise beginning with planning the exercise, assigning simulated entities tothe hardware available, starting the execution of the scenario, recording theexecution for After Action Review (AAR), and finishing with conducting the AARwith the training audience.

“Soldier touch points are critical to this developmentprocess as they ensure that the project is meeting the end users’ needs,” saidDr. Christina Bouwens, Deputy Program Manager, VT MAK. Warfighters participatedas role players interacting in a common scenario on the Ft. Hood terraincontrolling ground vehicles running on RVCT hardware through a hardwareabstraction layer, and dismounted units using RVCT Soldier stations.

The TMT provided an intuitive, user-friendly capability thatintegrated unit training information with training readiness requirements,prepped and launched training activities, and drove assessment activities, allfrom a single workstation.

MAK demonstrated progress toward the longer-term scalabilitygoals - including a cloud-based demonstration of VR-Forces integrated withImprobable's SpatialOS framework; and an on-premise preview of MAK'sinternally-developed scalability framework - managing and communicating withmore than two million entities.

Integration with STE-related Science & Technology(S&T) technology was shown, including: The Leidos-developed BehaviorService for including authoritative legacy data sources and behaviors into theTSS and TMT; and The Augmented REality Sandtable (ARES) visualizationcapability demonstrating an augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) viewof the simulation environment for collaborative training coordination.

MAK will provide another report after the next assessment in March and will continue to be transparent about the process as it develops.