The team behind “the VR ‘Chinook’” have taken to the sea with the Royal Marines for the next phase of the project.
The HIT (Human Interface Technologies Team) from the University of Birmingham worked with the Royal Marines aboard one of the elite amphibious troops’ Griffon 2400TD Hovercraft to capture video footage for the next phase of their Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT) trainer.
The team attached cameras to both hulls of the craft to capture video of the surrounding environment and craft exterior.
The Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT) trainer uses mixed reality (blending the real-world with the virtual) to better train army medics.
The first MERT trainer was created inside a rapidly inflatable and portable enclosure and was equipped with a variety of space-filling objects (including a highly realistic casualty mannequin) to give the illusion of operating on-board an RAF Chinook helicopter.
Since then the team simulated in-flight movement when wearing a virtual reality headset and created a new ‘mixed reality system’ to project drone footage of a barren region of Dartmoor outside the simulated cabin area.
The new footage the team collected onboard the Hovercraft will now be used to enhance the MERT simulator by providing views of the Hovercraft in motion from inside the main cabin and through the cockpit windscreen.
The next step will be for the HIT team to modify computer-aided design (CAD) files of the Griffon 2400TD to incorporate the footage to create a new training environment.
