Simulating naval operations with ENVISION

The study described has succeeded in demonstrating the current state of the technology and its limitations. In particular it has shown that it is capable of meeting the majority of the criteria set for the visualisation of the quarterdeck of a frigate and from it, the real time deployment of a towed body under different sea states. The principle of utilising this technology as a tool for use in defence procurement has also been demonstrated. So much so that a major defence project has adopted the principle of visualising the dynamic interface of its equipment with that of the platform in one of the phases of its procurement programme. The original requirement for this tool was that it should be PC based. The emphasis of the study was, however, changed to demonstrating the capabilities of the technology on workstations. This showed that workstations outperformed PCs in the areas of 3D graphics and floating point processing power. Programming interfaces for 3D graphics were competing to be established for the PC and it was felt that they could rival the current workstation performance in the not too distant future. Since then Windows '95 has been released and support has been added for 3D programming interfaces such as OpenGL. This has assisted in providing the PC with hardware graphics acceleration. Along with the development of the new Pentium chips (giving increased throughput) the PC has enough power now to support physics based simulations such as ENVISION and thus fulfilling the requirement for a PC based procurement tool. In addition, the success of the work on the posture stability model gives confidence that this procurement tool could also be expanded to include elements of human factors.