DYNAMIC TERRAIN

While many are familiar with flight simulators, there is also a growin g body of ground-based simulation training systems. The Army/DARPA spo nsored SIMNET project (Nelms 1988) involved over 200 armor and aircraf t simulators in a complex network, designed to teach combined arms com bat skills. The follow-on Close Combat Tactical Trainer (CCTT) project will be the largest training simulator acquisition in history. In add ition, realtime interactive simulation is moving beyond military train ing into the potentially much larger market of commercial, entertainme nt and educational applications currently being called ''Virtual Reali ty'' (Furness 1988). However, no existing realtime simulations support s a truly interactive world. In particular, the terrain (soil, water a nd vegetation) is nearly or completely immutable in today's simulators . In a word, the terrain is not dynamic. This Project explores the hyp othesis that it is economically feasible to construct networked realti me simulators which incorporate useful simulators which incorporate us eful simulations of dynamic terrain phenomena. The authors have evalua ted the computational requirements of realtime graphical dynamic terra in simulation with both theoretical models and prototypes, and conclud e that useful levels of terrain dynamics can be incorporated in the ne xt generation of low-cost, high-volume training simulators and virtual environments.