The U.S. Army has selected the Colorado-based defense intelligence company Vantor for a continued contract to support the service’s One World Terrain program, an initiative that Vantor says is used to “train and rehearse missions using high-precision, immersive 3D terrain.”
Vantor began providing data for the One World Terrain, or OWT, program in 2019. At the time, the company was known as Maxar Intelligence. The new contract, which is flexible and could feature spending up to $217 million, includes a possible four-year extension to scale OWT for the Army in the future.
“Our team is delivering high-precision, immersive 3D terrain that enhances the Army’s ability to train, rehearse and execute missions with confidence anywhere in the world,” Susanne Hake, the executive vice president of Vantor’s government division, said in a statement. “This award reflects Vantor’s commitment to providing trusted, innovative spatial intelligence solutions that meet the evolving needs of the U.S. Army.”
Vantor CEO Dan Smoot told Threat Status at The Washington Times in an exclusive interview recently that the company has made advances with something he called its “digital twin of the entire world” concept.
The Army’s OWT program will leverage the concept from Vantor to continue to have the “foundational data” to provide the most accurate digital model of the world available in near real-time.
“We’re bringing the 3D and foundational data into that,” Mr. Smoot told Threat Status in December.
The data used for the OWT program would also support virtual training in conjunction with a separate project called “Eagle Eye,” which is being developed by the California-based company Anduril.
Vantor says Eagle Eye will aim to leverage augmented reality displays to let troops train in a mirror of the conditions on a target. Everything from building layouts to how high a structure would appear in real life could be simulated both in augmented reality and in the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment. That program provides an automatically generated global simulation for the Army.
Many of the Army’s functions for headquarters above the brigade level rely on simulation-based training, mission rehearsals and digital models to follow along with real-world operations.
“You’re basically simulating a warfighting game with the soldiers with the goggles,” Mr. Smoot said of the Eagle Eye and Vantor combination. “It’s actually amazing, we recently saw some of the demos, and it feels very real.”
