DIS History
DIS originated from a Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) project in the late 1980’s called SIMNET. At the time TCP/IP and high speed networks were just getting their legs, computers and networks were becoming powerful enough to do the computational operations needed, and 3D graphics was in its infancy.
A screen capture from an early SIMNET application is shown below:
Each participant was in a SIMNET application that controlled a vehicle, such as a tank, and each simulator viewed the shared virtual battlefield. All the vehicles interacted in the same shared environment. If one simulator caused the tank it controlled to move the other participants saw that movement, in real time. This idea was advanced for the late 80's. Even networking was not universal in that era, CPUs were often computationally slow compared to those of a few years later, and graphics were primitive or non-existent. It was implemented on advanced research workstations. It wasn't until the early/mid 1990's that simulations of this sort could begin to be implemented on commercial machines and in the late 1990's commercial PCs had advanced graphics cards and enough CPU to work well at low prices.
The simulators of the era sometimes had displays that replicated a soldier’s view of the battlefield, but the host running the simulation before the SIMNET research were probably not have been networked with other hosts from multiple vendors. Each simulator worked in isolation, and an aircraft simulator done by a particular vendor couldn’t see a tank controlled by another simulator from another vendor. The idea of SIMNET-–quite advanced for the time–-was to create a virtual, shared battlefield in which all participants on multiple computers could see vehicles simulated on other hosts, and interact with each other. SIMNET’s major accomplishment was to serve as the research that allowed DIS to happen. Soon military 3D simulations could run on common office PCs.
DARPA projects were intended to transition out of the incubator research phase and into useful, real implementations. The SIMNET project worked out many of the state information exchange issues that were needed. Once that was done it needed to be standardized and refined outside of DARPA. The organization that would eventually do this was Simulation Interoperability Standards Group (SISO) that took over development of the network protocol portion of the project, which they renamed to DIS. SISO developed DIS in a series of workshops held from 1989 to 1996. Once the protocol was developed they took the relevant documents to the IEEE standards group and achieved DIS standard approval.
At the time of SIMNET the concept of a shared, networked environment was revolutionary. In today’s commercial game world entertainment like “Call of Duty” or “World of Tanks” routinely share environments between hosts. The companies that own these games make a lot of money selling such applications to the public, entertainment that draws in more revenue than movies. Some sources say that gaming currently makes $85 billion/year, the film industry makes $35 billion/year, and the music industry $15 billion/year.
There are a number of example applications of DIS available. This section simply shows a few so the reader can get an idea of what DIS is capable of helping implement. Some of the applicatons shown are commercial.
The company MetaVR has created an application that uses DIS called the Virtual Reality Scene Generator (VRSG). The VRSG application can implement views of terrain, with varying weather, and that includes aircraft.
MetaVR Has a web page devoted to the Virtual Reality Scene Generator application. Another web site for VRSG is at here, which features vehicles at the Yuma proving grounds and the Strait of Hormuz.
http://www.metavr.com/products/vrsg/vrsgstandalone.html
This application is put out by Battlespace Simulations, Inc. Their web site is at MASE According to company Battlespace Simulations,
MACE is a physics-based, many-on-many simulation and threat environment with a large order of battle, ideally suited for both standalone mission rehearsal and distributed mission simulation. MACE provides computer generated forces (CGF), sometimes called semi-autonomous forces (SAF), as well as scenario creation, management and IOS features. Using MACE, you can quickly and easily extend your distributed simulation framework. MACE supports the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) architecture including simulation management, entity state, fire, detonate and emissions PDUs.
The ACM project is a free game that can be used in the debian operating system.
A major web site is at ACM
According to the site, this is multiplayer aerial combat simulation. Players engage in air to air combat against one another using heat seeking missiles and cannons.
Main features include:
Simulation with 6 degrees of freedom. Structural limit to the vertical positive/negative load. Classic instruments, navigation and head-up display (HUD). Several aircraft models implemented, both civil and military. Two scenes provided, with many runways and radio stations.
DISWebGateway is a small open-dis project. The application reads native DIS traffic on the network, then forwards it to a web server. The DIS traffic can be interpreted by a Javascript implementation of DIS and used in a variety of ways. Users can visit a site on the server and see the effect.
This can be quite interesting. The server allows access to a huge range of capabilities, including remote web-based data The screen capture below shows an entity mapped by the Google Maps utility. OpenStreetMap is also supported.