Raytheon, Motion Reality Team for Immersive Virtual Simulation

March 15, 2010

Raytheon and Motion Reality have entered into an exclusive value-added reseller agreement to offer virtual 3-D mission and training applications to military, law enforcement and security forces.

The agreement pairs Raytheon's defense and government systems expertise with MRI's pioneering motion-capture technology, VIRTSIM, a widely recognized standard-setter in immersive virtual simulation.

"Together, Raytheon and MRI offer more responsive, flexible and complete end-to-end mission rehearsal and training solutions," said Glynn Raymer, vice president, Raytheon Network Centric Systems Combat Systems. "We are also looking at innovative applications that can lead to greater efficiencies in new product design, prototyping and testing."

"Raytheon and MRI have already developed a virtual simulation system to improve warfighter conditioning for the detection of improvised explosive device activity," said Jack Costello, vice president, NCS Strategic Planning and lead, Raytheon IED Defeat Task Force. "This immersive training solution will give our forces increased awareness necessary to defeat IEDs."

VIRTSIM can immerse up to 12 subjects wearing wireless head-mounted displays and using actual or simulated weapons. This real-time, untethered experience is enhanced by muscle stimulation technology, and the systems can be networked from multiple locations for distributed training.

"MRI's technology is unrivaled in its ability to accurately capture full-body 3-D motion," said Dr. Tom McLaughlin, MRI CEO.

The immersive 360-degree systems support force-on-force training and virtual artificially intelligent avatars that respond to actions and voice commands. "Our licensed motion-capture technology was used in the current blockbuster movie 'AVATAR,'" noted McLaughlin.

MRI has been a pioneer in 3-D real-time engineering analysis and computer graphics animation of human motion since 1984, including its creation of the first accurate 3-D human motions for both video games and motion pictures. MRI developed 3-D real-time consumer golf systems and has a legacy of work for the U.S. Army in Virtual Soldier Distributed Simulation. MRI's technology received a 2005 Academy Award for use in the motion pictures "Lord of the Rings," "King Kong" and others.