VR-VANTAGE

VR-Vantage vr-vantage_intro_brochure
The 3D Visual Solution That Fits

VR-Vantage is two ready-to-use applications and a toolkit, built on Open Scene Graph (OSG):

• MÄK Stealth 7.0 - The next generation of MÄK’s 3D information station
• VantageIG - the configurable Desktop Image Generator for OTW scenes and remote camera views
• VR-Vantage Toolkit - the 3D visual application development toolkit. Use it to customize or extend the included applications or to integrate VR-Vantage capabilities into your custom applications.How It Fits
  Fits Your Simulation System
  VR-Vantage Screenshot

There are many ways to integrate 3D graphics into your simulation system, and VR-Vantage provides the flexibility to fit your design.

VR-Vantage includes the next generation MÄK Stealth - MÄK’s 3D information station. Whether you need it for situational awareness, simulation debugging, or after action review, the MÄK Stealth provides the most data about your networked virtual world, and presents it in a clear and accessible way.

For those who need an out-the-window (OTW) scene or a view from a remote camera, VR-Vantage includes Vantage IG - the configurable desktop image generator. Vantage IG is designed for easy integration into desktop trainers and war gaming simulations.

Developers will enjoy the VR-Vantage Toolkit. The toolkit comes with all the software you need to completely rebuild visual applications like the MÄK Stealth or the Vantage IG and also allows you to customize and extend these applications to fit your unique requirements. The toolkit also gives you the power to embed any of the MÄK Stealth or Vantage IG capabilities directly into your simulation applications. And because the VR-Vantage Toolkit is based on Open Scene Graph, you can leverage value-added plug-ins built by the OSG community and MÄK partners.
Fits the Way You Work

VR-Vantage is designed to fit the way you work. While the application is running, you can reconfigure your windows and display channels, compose or load your terrain, edit model mappings, and connect to a DIS or HLA distributed simulation exercise. Using an intuitive GUI, navigate through the virtual world by dragging the terrain, clicking on a destination, or maneuvering the eye point using familiar first-person-shooter controls. You can orbit around buildings, attach to and follow entities, jump in the cockpit for an out-the-window view, or mount your virtual camera on a vehicle.
Fits Your Budget

VR-Vantage provides the best value among visual applications. A rich set of top-quality 3D entity models that support attached parts, damage representations, and articulated parts such as turrets and guns are included. Built-in support for Boston Dyamics’ DI-Guy, IDV’s SpeedTree, and Sundog’s SilverLining means that you don’t need to buy, integrate, and configure extra modules to have great looking human characters, dynamic trees and bushes, weather effects, and volumetric clouds. HLA and DIS support through MÄK’s own VR-Link networking toolkit is included, so that interoperability is a given, not an add-on.

Flexible licensing options allow you to have a lab full of ready-to-use applications at reasonable prices, or the ability to deploy applications without burdening your users with run-time license mechanisms.
The Technology
Open Scene Graph
VR-Vantage Rendering Engines

VR-Vantage is built on top of OSG because of its open API, strong performance, wide adoption by system integrators, and access to the community of OSG developers.

OSG provides a rendering infrastructure with data loaders for many commonly used simulation formats and innovative rendering techniques.

You will save time and money with VR-Vantage because you won’t have to spend months incorporating content and implementing application level functionality:

Game-like navigation interface
Sky/lighting/environment model
Entity management layer
DIS/HLA support
Human character animation
Real-time vegetation
Distributed rendering
A graphical user interface
Configuration system
Battlefield information overlays

With VR-Vantage, all of these capabilities are built-in, while still maintaining the same level of extensibility you’d have with Open Scene Graph.
Distributed Rendering
VR-Vantage Terrain Data

VR-Vantage’s built-in distributed rendering architecture fits your configuration display from multi-channel image generation on simple desktop configurations all the way up to multi-machine rendering farms for video walls or training devices. Designed to make Distributed Rendering easy to use, VR-Vantage includes a Remote Display Application that responds to any VR-Vantage application. So adding display channels is as simple as adding remote display applications to additional computers.
Terrain Agility

At MÄK, we understand the challenges of developing correlated distributed simulations. That’s why we built VR-Vantage to be Terrain Agile. Many 3D tools put the burden on the user to construct terrain in a format or structure that is specific to the tool. But VR-Vantage can directly load a wide variety of industry standard formats produced by a number of database tools. You can also compose terrain directly from the data source without the need to pre-build a terrain database! Raw elevation is dynamically tessellated into polygons with your imagery draped on top and point features are automatically replaced by 3D geometry. With VR-Vantage, you can load site models with dense urban buildup and thick vegetation as well as tiled terrain databases that page in over large areas. You can extract buildings and other objects from the terrain and manipulate them. Turn specific buildings semi-transparent to see human characters interacting inside.