TRAINING AND SIMULATION JOURNAL

Move It

KRISTIN QUINN – Apr. 7, 2011 – Organic Motion is partnering with CG², a subsidiary of Quantum3D, to study ways to make movement within immersive training environments more realistic and natural.

Organic Motion is integrating its Multi-Soldier Tracking Platform (MSTP) with CG²’s ExpeditionDI system on contract with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Simulation and Technology Training Center’s (STTC) Dismounted Soldier Lab.

Currently, a soldier using ExpeditionDI’s helmet-mounted immersive training system must control his movements in the virtual world using a traditional joystick on his gun. If the soldier wants to make a nonverbal signal to the other players in the game, such as putting an arm up, he must go to the joystick and pull-down menu to select that action.

“That’s counterintuitive to training,” said Andrew Tschesnok, CEO of Organic Motion.

With Organic Motion’s wireless optical technology, if a soldier puts his arm up, his character in the virtual world will do the same.

“We’re really trying to turn things into a more natural interaction,” Tschesnok said. “You can benefit from all the beautiful things in the virtual world where you have these rich scenarios, but you don’t want to lose what you get from live training.”

John Carswell, ExpeditionDI program manager for CG², said capturing soldier’s movements was limited in the past by the amount of technology that you could physically put on the soldier.

Organic Motion eliminates the need to put markers on the body or to modify a system in order to track a new movement or part of the body. “Organic Motion’s approach is that literally all of that information is being captured all the time,” Carswell said.

The two companies hope to provide STTC with a platform to take research to the next level, and understand virtual locomotion for a variety of avatar applications. Another potential benefit of allowing the simulation to “see” the soldier is the ability to generate reactions from avatars driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

“If you’re standing in front of AI avatars and you pull your gun, they should act differently than if you don’t,” Tschesnok said. “If you get the vision element in there, then it’s a bidirectional simulation. It essentially turns it into a window. It’s really going to change training.”

About Organic Motion, Inc.
Organic Motion, Inc. is a leading computer vision software company and maker of highly advanced markerless motion capture systems. The company’s line of products serve a number of leading global customers and was the recipient of the 2009 Wall Street Journal Innovation Award for Computing Systems.
Organic Motion’s systems revolutionizes training for the defense and security industries allowing for a multitude of training scenarios in a more realistic manner including live, virtual and constructive training.
For additional information, please visit www.organicmotion.com.

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Contacts:
Cecilia Panozzo
VP Marketing, Organic Motion
(212) 776-6100, Ext. 120
cecilia@organicmotion.com