G.I. Joystick

Illusion Inc. was born a military technology company. In its early years, the Westlake Village firm used government research grants to build a virtual reality network for the Defense Department.

Over the years, its focus shifted to high-tech entertainment attractions based on virtual reality technology. This Friday, the Sahara Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas will open the Grand Prix Racing Center, featuring 24 Illusion-built virtual cars all networked to race against one another.

Now the company expects to use the core technology that drives the cars to create multi-user simulations of tanks and helicopters for use in military training.

“People only talk about the transfer of military technology going one way,” says Matt Walton, Illusion’s vice president for sales, marketing and strategy. “Technology that was originally developed for the military is leading to significant innovations in the entertainment world, and now we’re finding that it migrates back again to the military.”

Conveniently for Southern California, the basic technologies that drive two of the region’s biggest industries are now looking remarkably alike, according to a new report from the National Research Council. The report, titled “Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense,” also suggests that the two industries should collaborate in a number of areas, including:

* Technology to make virtual reality environments much more realistic, including enhancements in the user’s ability to see, hear and touch.

* Networked simulations where hundreds or even thousands of people scattered around the world can participate in a game or training exercise at the same time.

* Computer-generated characters that can adapt to changes in a game or training simulation, which would make it more challenging and realistic for the user.

* Tools to handle large databases that contain three-dimensional models of buildings, terrain and other objects used to build simulated environments.

* Standards to link a variety of computer simulator systems seamlessly on a single network.

“This really is research where the two communities can get together and say, ‘Yes, we can see there’s a common goal here, and we’re each willing to put in the time to solve the problem jointly so that we both can use it,’ ” said Michael Zyda, a professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and chairman of the National Research Council committee that wrote the report.

While the recommendations make sense on paper, whether researchers from worlds as different as the entertainment and defense industries can collaborate effectively is an open question.

While Hollywood is content to use off-the-shelf technology, the military often insists on building its own solutions from scratch. And for all of the secrecy the military requires, entertainment companies are even more obsessed with keeping their projects under wraps.

Indeed, one project established as a result of the report is already struggling under the weight of 11 entertainment attorneys and is becoming “a lawyer sinkhole,” Zyda said.

While both groups use the same underlying technologies, problems can arise because their priorities for using them can differ sharply. Entertainment firms put a premium on the way a game or special effect looks, how much it costs and whether it will be ready in time to meet a production deadline. Most research is, therefore, short-term and focused on a specific application.

For the military, the priority is for a simulation to feel like an actual battlefield situation or for a data network to be hacker-proof. Research investments are long-term and go to a variety of projects.

Illusion has tried twice to develop simulation products in joint ventures with large aerospace companies, but each attempt ended in failure, Walton said. Engineers from the defense companies wanted to “invest very large sums of money and take large amounts of time to create stuff that 35 companies were already making,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense.”

Still, a number of companies are already taking advantage of the many areas of crossover. Viewpoint DataLabs was founded in 1988 to make 3-D re-creations of events such as car crashes for lawyers to use during trials. By 1991, the Orem, Utah-based company was making detailed digital models for Hollywood. A few years later, defense giant Lockheed Martin asked Viewpoint to create real-time simulations of warplanes.

“If a game company comes to us and we don’t have the data, we can build the data and then also sell it to the military community,” said Barlow Blake, Viewpoint’s solutions director for government and visual simulations. “The same thing works the other way around.”

Paradigm Simulation in Dallas started out making high-end software development tools for building models of planes and flight simulators, serving military clients such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Game maker Nintendo asked the company to develop a flight sim game called “Pilot Wings 64.” This spring, the company spun off Paradigm Entertainment to work exclusively on games and entertainment applications, said Bruce Caridi, vice president of sales and marketing for Paradigm Simulation.

Cinebase Software, a West Los Angeles maker of digital media management software, first targeted clients such as Warner Bros. Animation that need to store gigantic digital video and special-effects files. Then the Defense Department’s National Intelligence Mapping Agency asked Cinebase to help it store and organize its images.

“NIMA has the same problem that the Hollywood studios have,” said Michael Abrams, Cinebase’s vice president of solutions. “They have a lot of digital media, and they need to be able to get it, store it, find it, use it and put it back. . . . A picture taken by a satellite is exactly the same as a picture taken on a sound stage--it’s just bits and bytes.”

Since he began working with the mapping agency last year, Abrams has discovered technologies that Cinebase may try to commercialize for the entertainment industry, including one that enables a computer to search through picture files for a specific image the way a computer can search through text to find a keyword.

Today, plenty of technologies are already ripe for crossover development, and the report suggests that the entertainment and defense industries share more of their past research so that resources aren’t wasted on reinventing the wheel. Military types could attend conferences such as Siggraph and the Electronic Entertainment Expo, where the latest entertainment technology is on display, the report says.

But the Defense Department doesn’t have a catalog of its useful technologies, although they are becoming easier to find as more of them are described on Web pages, Zyda said. He proposes that a clearinghouse for tracking common technologies be set up at a university, and he named the Integrated Media Systems Center at USC as a prime contender.

Since military downsizing is forcing the Defense Department to look to commercial industry for cheaper, off-the-shelf solutions, that will drive it closer to its counterparts in Hollywood.

“If the military can ride that wave [of commercial innovation], they can get much, much cheaper hardware sooner for all of the things they want to do,” said Joshua Larson-Mogal, a manager of product strategy for Silicon Graphics and a member of the committee that wrote the report. And, if the entertainment and defense industries can share the load for research and development, both sides “can spend less and get more.”

Karen Kaplan covers technology, telecommunications and aerospace. She can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com