DiSTI to continue support for the U.S. Army's UH-72A Lakota virtual maintenance trainer
NewsAugust 03, 2017
ORLANDO, Fla. U.S. Army officials opted for a second year of Interim Contractor Support (ICS) for the the UH-72A Lakota Virtual Maintenance Trainer (VMT) with DiSTI Corp. The initial $4.4 million contract on the UH-72A included the development of a VMT to provide students the ability to familiarize and practice maintenance tasks in an interactive 3-D game-like envrionment.
The delivery included 12 interactive student workstations with a networked Instructor station, an additional “hangar” workstation collocated with a hardware-based trainer, and a “reach-back” training capability to deploy virtual training content on hand-held mobile devices.
The trainer was implemented at the Western Army National Guard Aviation Training Site (WAATS) in Marana, Arizona in early 2016 and graduated its first class of trainees that June. Since the UH-72A is an Army variant of a commercial helicopter, the VMT is built such that students learn to maintain the aircraft to FAA standards.
Joe Swinski, President of DiSTI, says the core of the program is based on the company's software toolchain called VE Studio. What makes this unique is that the "Army has the ability to conduct training on large screens, desktop size screens, as well as mobile devices. In addition, their solution has also been designed to be deployed on Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) platforms. As the Army looks to take advantage of the new capabilities that these technologies offer, their current UH-72A trainer can be easily expanded. There is a tremendous amount of interest within the Defense and Commercial industries to use AR and VR technology to improve training and we are able to deliver that capability today.”
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