FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts:   Jeffrey R. Hogue
            Systems Technology, Inc.
            310/679-2281, ext. 52
            jeffhogue@systemstech.com
            http://www.systemtech.com/paramain.htm

HAWTHORNE, Calif., January 13, 1997 — Systems Technology, Inc. (STI) today announced that the company's Parachute Flight Training Simulators are being driven by 3Dfx Interactive's Voodoo Graphics™-based Obsidian graphics board. The systems are in use with four U.S. Marine Corps elite Force Reconnaissance units to safely teach, plan, and practice dangerous parachute missions. Installations have been made at Quantico, Virginia; Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; Camp Pendelton, California; and Panama City, Florida. The delivery of these systems marks the first actual in-service training application of this new low-cost, high- performance technology, originally developed to bring PC and arcade gamers the high level of visual realism found in extremely costly military and civilian professional training systems.

"Parachute missions are difficult, expensive and hazardous to train, plan and practice in actual flight. Now that our systems are enhanced with 3Dfx Interactive's Obsidian graphics board, operational personnel can plan and practice group missions at specific sites, trainees can deal with a variety of potential emergencies, and aircrew personnel can practice emergency procedures over scenes based on their anticipated actual operations," said Jeffrey R. Hogue, Principal Specialist at STI.

The U.S. Marine Corps systems combine a Virtual Reality head mounted display and tracker with the latest developments in low-cost high quality 3D texture-mapped graphics from 3Dfx Interactive. This produces a compelling, immersive and realistic environment which allows for obstacle tracking and avoidance, a view of malfunctions overhead, as well as the field of view and display rate to avoid common simulator sickness. Specific mission scenes can be created from digital map data and practiced with other recorded or networked jumpers.

"The Obsidian graphics boards enable military and civilian visual simulation application developers, like STI, to deploy PC-based systems, thereby replacing proprietary image generator (IG) and workstation solutions which typically are ten times the cost for equivalent levels of 3D performance," said Ross Smith, general manager of 3Dfx Interactive's System Products Division. "The extension into this market is a further validation of the power of our 3D graphics platform."

Staff Sargent Edward Walsh of Camp LeJeune's 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company noted, "Parachute flight simulation visual requirements are far more challenging than for any conventional military aircraft, and classroom lectures cannot offer the practice necessary to develop skills. The STI simulator provides immediate assessment and solution of any canopy deployment problems and allows the user to set up and fly a landing pattern while scanning in all directions for team members, obstacles, and hostile forces."

Parachute Simulator Flight Training Requirements
Parachutes allow rapid deployment of operational mission specialists when fixed or rotary wing aircraft alone are inappropriate. However, parachutists who are injured on landing, or land in the wrong location, degrade or nullify operational effectiveness. Skillful parachuting is vital to mission success.

Military aircrew receive maneuverable parachutes for emergencies, but when these occur they have none of the options on landing terrain, wind maximums, hostile location, and time of day or night that are available to operational parachutists. The U.S. Air Force averages over 25 aircraft ejections per year and the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps over 50, of which over 90% are survivable. Of these, over half result in injuries or worse, and a significant number are related to parachute flight skills. Aircrew losses have enormous social, financial, political, and tactical costs. Although aircrew proficiency is critical, any actual flight training provided is limited to a towed upwind low altitude launch under benign conditions at beginning of their careers. Subsequent training has been limited to lectures and procedures drills in a suspended harness, because emergencies are rare events and the hazards of real parachuting flights to a highly (and very expensively) trained individual. Essential parachuting skills and self-confidence could not be developed.

Teaching parachute flight has always been a difficult task. Safe, accurate parachuting requires both training and the practice of perceptual skills. Parachutists must learn to accurately assess parachute opening status, sense visual motion cues, and to predict and manage their descent and drift toward the landing zone while avoiding obstacles. Traditional professional training techniques were limited to texts, lectures, procedures drills, and actual (but solo) flights. Physical skills can only be acquired through practice experiences, not classroom lectures.

Flight simulation training, long accepted as an essential (though very expensive) standard for military and commercial aircraft, provided a solution for the smokejumpers, parachuting forest fire fighters, whose organizations see directly the costs of injuries to their civilian employees. The same justifications that make aircraft simulation a success apply to parachute simulation: safety, availability, economy, and efficiency. STI developed a low cost system for the smokejumpers budget in collaboration with their instructors which met their training needs but stayed within their limited. They reported reduced training costs and improved parachuting performance and safety.

STI has continued to deliver these systems to smokejumpers around the world over the past nine years. The military, who frequently train with smokejumpers, have been slowly adopting simulator use. The U.S. Navy has recently conducted an aircrew emergency parachute training evaluation at NAS Cecil Field, Florida. This study found a requirement for parachute simulator training but with better face-validity than provided by the previous low cost PC display technology, with its sparse graphics detail and monitor-based view limitations. STI has responded to these concerns with their new system, receiving an enthusiastic military response to a simulator experience which they report as closely replicating real world parachuting.

Obsidian Graphics Board Family Capabilities and Performance
Based on advanced configurations of 3Dfx Interactive's Voodoo Graphics 3D graphics chipset, the Obsidian graphics board family is optimized to deliver interactive 3D applications with photo-realistic quality at real-time frame rates to address a range of different commercial and professional 3D applications. The Obsidian graphics board family exploits the Voodoo Graphics chipset's patent-pending "texture streaming" architecture to deliver up to 2.4 Gigabytes per second of dedicated graphics memory bandwidth to real-time 3D applications. This highly dedicated memory bandwidth, coupled with the technology's on-chip "triangle set-up" engine, enables the various Obsidian graphics board products to render over one million texture mapped triangles per second and to sustain tri-linear filtered texture map fill rates at up to 100 Megapixels per second. Such levels of texture mapped performance are currently available only on high-end 3D workstations and dedicated image generators.

All of the 3D features supported by the Voodoo Graphics chipset are supported by the Obsidian graphics board family. Examples of such 3D features include perspective correction, sub-pixel and sub-texel correction, triangle set-up, depth-buffering, alpha-blending, tri-linear and bi-linear filtering with level-of-detail MIP mapping, and texture and polygonal anti-aliasing -- all of which are essential for visually realistic simulation and entertainment applications. In addition to its core 3D capabilities, applications deployed on the Obsidian graphics boards can take advantage of the Voodoo Graphics chipset's more advanced capabilities, including comprehensive alpha blending with support for translucency and transparency at both the polygon and texture level, projected and detailed texture mapping, environment mapping, texture morphing, per pixel fog and associated atmospheric effects, texture animation, video texture mapping, fast linear frame buffer access, high-bandwidth texture paging, and support for 13 different texture formats, including 8-bit palletized and 3Dfx patent-pending narrow channel compressed format. The Obsidian graphics boards are available in a variety of Voodoo Graphics chipset configurations with either 2, 4, or 8 MB of effective frame buffer memory and 2, 4 or 8MB of effective texture memory. Prices for the graphics boards, which are sold via 3Dfx Interactive's network of manufacturer's representives to OEMs, VARs, and system integrators range between $500 to $2,500.

The Companies
Systems Technology, Inc. is an employee-owned research, consulting engineering, and product development firm located in Hawthorne, California. They specialize in vehicle dynamics and control and related human factors. For almost forty years they have been involved in research and design related to a wide range of aerospace, automotive, and marine vehicles. Their work in aerospace and defense has involved dynamic analysis, flight control system design, and flying qualities of fighters, transports, VSTOL, rotorcraft, the space shuttle, rockets, and missiles. Their automotive work has involves vehicle dynamics, handling qualities, transportation safety, driver behavior, and forensic engineering. They have performed this research and developed performance specifications for customers including the US Department of Defense, Department of Transportation, NASA and many of the major aerospace and automotive firms. Their research has also lead to the development and marketing of specialized analytical software as well as low cost simulators and human performance assessment devices. For more information about Systems Technology, Inc., visit the company's Website at http://www.systemstech.com.

3Dfx Interactive, Inc., founded in 1994, is a privately held company headquartered in San Jose, California. 3Dfx Interactive brings together a team of leading professionals from the 3D graphics, video game, multimedia, PC, and semiconductor industries to provide advanced technology that enables new levels of interactive 3D electronic entertainment and visual simulation. Consumer PC, multimedia and coin-op/arcade OEMs have announced support for the critically-acclaimed Voodoo Graphics chipset, including Acclaim Entertainment, Diamond Multimedia, Digital Vehicles, Hewlett-Packard Company, Falcon Northwest, Interactive Light, Micron Computers, NEC Technologies, Orchid Technologies, and Williams-Atari-Bally-Midway. Visual simulation companies that announced support for Voodoo Graphics include SAIC, Datapath, Gemini Technology, Reality by Design, System Technology, MaK Technology, MetaVR and McFadden Entertainment Systems. For more information about 3Dfx Interactive, visit the company's Website at http://www.3Dfx.com.

Trademarks: The 3Dfx Interactive logo and Voodoo Graphics are trademarks of 3Dfx Interactive, Inc. All other brand names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders, and are hereby acknowledged.


More detailed information about Systems Technology from a link to the STI corporate home page.

Answers to questions about Parachute Simulator Flight Training.

More information about Canopy Control Training for Smokejumpers and Operational Military Personnel.

More information about Aircrew Emergencies and Aviation Physiology.

View a collection of Parachute Simulator Press Releases.

Detailed information on Press and Technical Articles.

View a collection of Parachute Simulator VR Screen Images.

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