December 01, 2008 08:00 AM Eastern Time 

Forterra Awarded Contract by PEO STRI to Integrate Virtual World Technology with OneSAF

ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Forterra Systems, the market and technology leader in purpose built virtual worlds, announced today that the Program Executive for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation (PEO-STRI), has awarded the company a contract to integrate its OLIVE™ (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) platform with the U.S. Army’s One Semi-Automated Forces (OneSAF) system to support military training. The result of the effort will be an engaging user experience based on commercial social network and gaming technologies seamlessly integrated with the realism, accuracy, and precision of the validated and verified (V&V) mathematical and physics-based models of the OneSAF simulation engine. In the environment, real people — represented by avatars — will be able to meet and collaborate for a plethora of reasons: cultural awareness training, mission rehearsal, simulation-based design, first responder training, crisis resource management training and so on, and be supported by a variety of non-player characters generated by validated U.S. Army models.

Today’s contemporary operating environment (COE) consists of potential adversaries that exhibit a variety of individual and coordinated behaviors. Proper response to these behaviors is becoming a critical training requirement for soldiers. A variety of commercial gaming technologies are being proposed to provide the requisite training environment. While gaming technologies can be used to create engaging learning experiences, they typically lack the realism needed to properly portray the COE without significant modifications. Behaviors of non-player entities are a particularly acute problem as most gaming artificial intelligence is limited to making a game challenging and fun rather than realistic. Investments made by the DoD in AI technologies have produced a far more accurate and representative repository of the types of behaviors needed to reflect the COE. Integrating realistic non-player entities with gaming technologies has great potential to solve several current training gaps. This project will develop interoperability between OLIVE’s gaming technology and OneSAF to produce superior training outcomes.

“Forterra is committed to interoperability with government and commercial standards,” said Dr. Mike Macedonia, VP/GM Forterra Federal Systems. “This project demonstrates the type of investment protection the Army is looking for where proven legacy technologies can seamlessly integrate with next generation collaboration tools to provide superior training solutions for soldiers.”

“The use of gaming technology shows great promise to support training but the environments and situations soldiers experience must be realistic and accurate,” said Dr. Jim Blake, PEO for the U.S. Army PEO STRI. Dr. Blake went on to say, “The U.S. Army has invested in OneSAF to produce a solution for this challenge and to minimize the need for live role players for creating relevant simulations. This effort, where gaming technology is integrated with OneSAF, has the potential to produce the types of simulated engagements for which soldiers need be prepared.”

About Forterra Systems

Forterra Systems is the leader in providing enterprise grade virtual world technology for the corporate, healthcare, government, education, and entertainment industries. Forterra's software and services enable organizations to collaborate, train, rehearse, and hold events using existing media technologies integrated into a compelling 3D virtual world. Using the OLIVE™ (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) platform and industry standard PC hardware, customers can rapidly generate realistic, collaborative, 3D Internet solutions that scale from single user applications to large scale simulated environments supporting many thousands of concurrent users for public and private use cases. http://www.forterrainc.com

About PEO STRI

Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation is an acquisition agency whose mission is to provide responsive interoperable Simulation, Training, Testing Solutions and Acquisition Services for the Warfighters and the nation. More information about PEO STRI is available on the web at http://www.peostri.army.mil