VBS2 Lewis Land Navigation Trainer 1.6

| Brian T. Hall

Our VBS2 Land Navigation Trainer v1.6 is finally complete and ready for release.

Product Release Video:

On Milgaming:
https://milgaming.army.mil/VBS2/files/d … =1&rid=657

Alternate Download:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B832dW … jBfVlRrTkU

The VBS2 Land Navigation Trainer is designed to fill the gap between classroom instruction and an actual land navigation course

Trainer focuses on:
– Correct plotting of points
– Establishing a plan for completing the course (attack points)
– Calculation of distance and direction
– Correct use of pace count and pace beads

There are two courses included in the trainer. One is a beginner course with 8 points closely spaced and always given in the same order so an instructor can walk students through each point. The other is an experienced course where the student is assigned up to 8 points that randomize within a 150 meter radius. These points are spaced much further apart and are much more difficult to locate.
The instructor has the option to select the number of points assigned (from 3 to 8 ), the time of day (Day/Night), the weather (Cloudy, Sunny, Rainy), whether night vision is available, and whether G-M angle calculations are required.
The instructor station provides real-time evaluation of each student participating in the course and allows the instructor to perform remedial training to students who are struggling without waiting until the end of a 5 hour land nav course

West Points VBS2 Land Navigation

| Brian T. Hall

This is the new instructor station for the West Point VBS2 Land Navigation Trainer.  Since West Point has two separate courses, I had to figure out how to display the two maps in a way that made each of them readable.   I added a swap map button at the top to toggle between the maps and show the appropriate checkpoints.  The student positions will automatically show up in the window, even if they are not on that course.  I also discovered how to dynamically colorize the text in the student table window to give the instructor a visual indicator about the student’s progress.  This is especially important with the Time Stationary column to help the instructor determine if a student needs additional training.

This is VBS2 – US Army Gaming

| Brian T. Hall

I requested this video to replace a several year old video some of our customers were using to show off VBS2 and also to highlight some of the awesome videos that we’ve created.  I love the Modern Warfare/Battlefield 3 vibe to the video.  It’s one of my favorite videos we’ve ever done.

VBS2 Land Navigation Trainer

| Brian T. Hall

My motivation for creating a land navigation trainer inside Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2), the US Army’s official Game for Training, came from a friend of my wife’s from our time in the Army.  When we met him for dinner, he was finishing up his time as the lead Army cadet instructor at a large military college.  I asked him if I could make one product for him, what would it be?  Without hesitating, he said that they desperately needed a way to train land navigation, a crucial skill for cadets to learn so they could pass the course given during their summer training at Fort Lewis, Washington.

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Battle of Ganjgal Valley with MG Brown Introduction

| Brian T. Hall

For the Battle of Ganjgal Lessons Learned Visualization, I read all available information, both classified and unclassified, to create a script and storyboard to support the desired product for the Center for Army Lessons Learned.  After the terrain was created by our Terrain Creation Team, I used satellite imagery to place the buildings in the village of Ganjgal and surrounding areas of interest.  Once the level design was set, I began to script the actions of the avatars according to the storyboard leading to a 17 minute Lessons Learned Visualization, portion of which were featured on 60 Minutes.

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Introduction to an Army Rifle Squad

| Brian T. Hall

This video was created from a request from Cadet Command at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  They originally requested 9 Soldiers standing in a line in the desert and each one would recite their job description in turn.  I made a demo videos showing the customer my idea for how to liven the project up quite a bit and received their permission to go ahead with my idea.  I set the video in the middle of a combat patrol so that the audience would have something visually interesting to keep them engaged and so that I could show off the weapon systems against enemy forces.  I was also selected to voice the narration in this video.

Videos

| Brian T. Hall

I have created 55 videos for various military training events.  Here is a sample of a few of them.

Heat Can Kill 2 is the sequel to a video we created after a Soldier died of Heat Stroke at Fort Jackson in 2010.  The video was made mandatory viewing by anyone working with Soldiers and there were zero heat related fatalities in the Summer of 2011.

Land Navigation Course Basic is the companion video to our VBS2 Land Navigation Trainer, intended to help those that have never participated in a real land navigation course before.

This video for the US Marine Corps Infantry Officer school was the first video I was assigned.  I learned very quickly that creating a 30 minute scenario in VBS2 made it very hard for the videographers to get the shots they needed for the training video.  After that, each of my videos was broken down to individual scenes, very much like the movie industry.

This video was our first experiment with motion capture and getting point cloud data into VBS2.  The process took us a while to figure out, but the low crawl animation turned out very well and accurate for Soldiers to learn from.