ORLANDO, Fla. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — April 10, 2018 — Bohemia Interactive Simulations (BISim), a global developer of advanced military simulation and training software, today announced the release of VBS Blue IG, its high-performance, CIGI-compliant, 3D whole-earth image generator. BISim first made its mark in the military simulation and virtual training market with the release of Virtual Battlespace (VBS), a comprehensive desktop training product. Based on flexible gaming technology, VBS delivered high-fidelity, low-cost disruptive technology into the mil-sim domain; it has since been widely adopted by defense organizations in 57 countries, and is used to train hundreds of thousands of military personnel annually.

With the release of VBS Blue IG, the company’s second major product, BISim aims to use game-based technology and its knowledge of military customers’ needs to disrupt the image generator market.

VBS Blue IG is a 3D planetary simulation that is cloud-enabled, geo-specific with round-earth procedural rendering and editing. VBS Blue IG is designed for all applicable use cases from land, air and sea, including multichannel IG configurations as well as virtual reality-based training applications. VBS Blue IG’s uniquely versatile engine is able to provide new training capability for military and defense organizations to visualize and rehearse complex joint military operations anywhere in the world.

VBS Blue IG has been already demonstrated for a range of different simulation and training uses including a Virtual Reality-based flight and air crew trainer for the U.S. Navy, a multichannel simulation for JTAC/FAC training, developed in collaboration with system integrator QuantaDyn Corp., and an Augmented Reality flight simulation concept demonstrator developed with TRU Simulation + Training Inc., a Textron Inc. (NYSE: TXT) company. VBS Blue technology is also used for research and demonstrations related to the U.S. Army’s Synthetic Training Environment One World Terrain project for rapid modeling of geo-specific representations of megacities in synthetic environments designed for cloud-based collective training.

“The importance of VBS Blue IG to BISim and the wider simulation community should not be underestimated. The underlying technology, VBS Blue, is a highly advanced, scene generation technology which has been built to be incredibly flexible in ingesting any conceivable terrain data type and thus allowing hyper-fast terrain generation and access to all types of open source and proprietary existing data formats,” said Arthur Alexion, co-CEO of BISim. “Built on top of VBS Blue is a highly capable image generator, leveraging game-based technology and BISim’s massive model library. Expertise built through supply of the image generator for CCTT, the U.S. Army’s largest simulator training program, and through working with leading simulation companies such as Quantdyn and Textron, has hardened the product to the point where we are now ready to release the first commercial version, 18.1. We expect to significantly disrupt the existing image generator market by offering a keenly priced, highly competent image generator backed by a team of high quality development and professional services engineers. This is BISim’s second major product launch after VBS1 was launched all the way back in the early 2000s and we are aiming to make it as big a success as VBS3 (BISim’s desktop training product).”

VBS Blue IG offers comprehensive image generation capability including:

• Global synthetic environment with procedurally generated 3D roads, buildings and vegetation
• Support for WGS-84 round-earth visualization
• Support for CIGI and VBS3 simulation hosts
• Over 10,000 high-fidelity 3D vehicle, weapon and character models
• Support for the latest VR/AR head-mounted display technology
• Mission functions including collision detection, height above terrain, and laser range finding
• Dynamic atmospheric effects including weather, clouds, fog and haze
• Dynamic craters and terrain modifications
• Synchronized multi-channel support and configuration
• Support for rapidly generating high-detailed insets from GIS source data using TerraTools
• An extendable data plugin system

In conjunction with the release of VBS Blue IG, BISim is also launching a new software development kit, available to customize any aspect of VBS Blue IG. VBS IG SDK is a set of APIs and tools for IG developers to customize and extend VBS Blue IG. The APIs form a modular plugin architecture (based on BISim’s new modular development framework called Gears) that enable developers to integrate third-party technologies effectively and efficiently.

“We are really proud of our new family of products, which are designed to support our prime contractor customers. The combination of cutting-edge technology and in-house SDK mean that we can supply a really first-class technology experience to our 165 prime contractor customers around the world,” said BISim CTO Mark Dzulko.