Hollywood, military meet at tech crossroads

By Marsha Walton
CNN Sci-Tech
2001.12.25

(CNN) --When people envision Hollywood, words like creative, flashy and cutting-edge likely come to mind. But when people think of the military, the reaction is probably the exact opposite: precise, controlled and traditional.

Yet when it comes to technology, these two worlds often merge.

Some of the same high-powered graphic techniques that bring dinosaurs to life in movies such as "Jurassic Park," or create the stunning waves in "The Perfect Storm" are adapted by the U.S. Department of Defense to train pilots and provide virtual reality training to Special Forces.

"The military and entertainment are the two customers that push Silicon Graphics the most. Each one of them are the ones that are never satisfied with 'good enough,'" said Greg Estes, vice president of marketing for SGI (Silicon Graphics).

Artists and computer experts have been pushing the envelope for more than 20 years for these seemingly strange bedfellows.

"Our first customer was NASA, our second customer was the Walt Disney Company," Estes said.

Estes said a lot of the flight-simulator technology now used to train military pilots was driven by early requirements from the entertainment industry.

Graphics help convey information

That training, plus aerial surveillance and weather forecasting, were among the displays at a recent forum on graphic technology and the digital battlefield, hosted by SGI in Washington, DC.

"You can absorb a lot more information in a graphic sense than you can in text, so visualization is important in all of this," said Arthur Money, former assistant secretary of Defense for Command and Control Communications. Money is now on the board of directors of SGI.

Money says putting markers on a wall map was about as high-tech as things got early in his military career.

Now, he says, "The information is collected from anywhere in the world, processed in another place, disseminated seamlessly so everybody has the same picture. So that to me is a revolution."

Some pilots who have trained on these high-tech simulators say the visualization of terrain and vegetation helped them out in the cockpit.

"I have war fighters coming back from a mission and basically saying, 'It's as if I had been there before,'" said Robert Mace of Anteon Corp.

"It is best to fight on familiar terrain, and we provide that in a three-dimensional format, so they can truly rehearse their mission before anybody is shooting at them," said Mace, a retired naval flight officer.

Anteon, a systems engineering company, works with the National Imagery and Mapping Agency to translate raw data into usable form for the Department of Defense.

Time crunch

While Hollywood has the luxury of time to tweak and adjust its imaginary twisters and triceratops, military strategists may have just hours or even minutes to make decisions.

That quick processing of information can be crucial for military weather forecasters. A correct forecast can be a crucial component in a battle, or in making a decision to fly or not to fly.

While meteorologists have used supercomputers for years to develop their forecasts, SGI says its technology helps translate the information into a form that pilots, navigators, or ground troops can almost immediately understand.

"Rather than just seeing reams of data and scrolling text, what you can do with our technology is take it and create a visual representation that is much more understandable, and more rapidly, for human perception," said John Burwell, director of government industries for SGI.

Companies such as Alias/Wavefront that specialize in 3-D graphics for films, videos and interactive games are using those technologies to develop war games for the U.S. Army, the U. S. Navy, and the CIA. Programmers can combine photos and 2-D satellite images to create "walk-throughs" or "fly throughs" to preview a mission.

SGI's Greg Estes says the military and entertainment industry's symbiotic relationship keeps them both on the leading edge.

"The same super computers that are being used by the military to model weather, for instance, were used by Industrial Light & Magic to make the waves for "The Perfect Storm" and for "Pearl Harbor," he said.