ASTi Teams With MÄK to Add Interactive Voice and 3D Sound to Synthetic Training Environments

Is it possible to crank up the realism of synthetic training environments while reducing exercise setup and runtime overhead? Absolutely!

MÄK and Advanced Simulation Technology inc. (ASTi), a predominant provider of sound modeling and virtual communications products, know it’s possible. To prove it, we combined ASTi’s highly realistic and fully automated 3D sound modeling and interactive voice communications with MÄK’s VR-Forces.

What Does This Mean For You?

MÄK worked with ASTi to integrate ASTi’s Earshot into VR-Forces to automatically add highly realistic 3D sounds to each VR-Forces entity. Out of the box, Earshot knows standard entity types and has built-in sound models tuned to match the sound of real-world vehicles, weapons fire, and detonations. All it takes to bring enveloping, high fidelity, directional sound to your simulation environment is simply connecting Earshot to your network. With this low-overhead approach, Joint Terminal Air Controller (JTAC) domes and other training systems come to life with activity created by VR-Forces and sound created by Earshot.

Historically, subject matter experts (SMEs) have served as role players to listen and interpret the voice communications in collective exercises. This is a very costly, labor-intensive approach and SMEs are a limited resource. Instead of relying on human role players, what if entities in your scenario could interactively speak with synthetic voices? ASTi's Construct makes this a reality. When integrated with VR-Forces, Construct enables entities to interact verbally with human trainees by adding radio modeling, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and natural language processing. These technologies are tightly integrated in Construct to allow for rapid customization while also tailoring the speech models to specific domains, such as close-air-support, to produce optimal speech recognition rates.

Bring it All Together

The combination of MÄK's VR-Forces with ASTi's Construct and Earshot provides an enhanced synthetic training environment and reduces the time and manpower required to perform collective training.

Reprinted with permission from VT MÄK. You can find the original release here: http://www.mak.com/wum/wum_vol-16_no-5.pdf.