Immersion of a live individual combatant into a virtual battlespace

An integration effort of motion capture systems and head-mounted display (HMD) technologies, coupled with distributed interactive simulation (DIS) capabilities, has lead to the implementation of an untethered, fully-immersible, DIS-compliant, real-time Dismounted Soldier Simulation (DSS) System. The untethered soldier, or individual combatant (IC), outfitted with a set of light-reflective markers and a wireless head-mounted display can move about freely within a real-world motion capture area while being fully-immersed into the virtual world by the HMD. Position and orientation data is gathered by cameras which are sampled at 60 Hz by a Datacube image processing computer and fed to a Silicon Graphics RE2 for DIS network processing and image generation. The Silicon Graphics RE2 acts as both the host computer and the image generator. The IC's ability to move, interact with other entities, fire an M16 rifle, hear DIS battlefield audio, and communicate with other entities via a DIS radio simulator in the virtual world, is unencumbered by wires or peripheral devices in the real world. Position and orientation information as well as the IC's discrete state, what the IC is doing (i.e., running, walking, crawling), is transmitted onto the DIS network in the Entity State Protocol Data Unit (PDU), and full articulated human motion, how the IC is moving, is transmitted in the Data PDU. Data PDUs are sent out containing the real-time motion data so that simulations who are interested, and have the capability of rendering fully articulated human motion can do so.