The Air Power is making ready to purchase a digital actuality software that simulates coaching eventualities particularly geared toward cultivating its welding expertise.
Army items have been more and more buying and deploying VR capabilities to complement and advance real-world training choices for his or her personnel lately. However what’s distinctive about this newest VR-centered request for quotations from the 92nd Air Refueling Wing at Fairchild Air Power base is that it blossomed out of a profitable thought from one of many department’s innovation-focused Spark Tank contests.
“The Digital Welder Coach requirement is a results of profitable the Inland Spark Tank Competitors, which is the competitors on the set up stage,” Contracting Officer Paul Blais and Contract Specialist, Commodities and Providers Flight Workers Sgt. Carlos Melendez, each with the 92nd Contracting Squadron, instructed FedScoop in an emailed assertion. “Due to the entry of this concept into the Spark Tank competitors, it was one of many winners to obtain the funding from Spark Tank for the acquisition of a system.”
One department of prolonged actuality rising applied sciences, VR immerses customers into seemingly actual, however computer-generated, environments by way of wearables which are often headsets. As their computing infrastructure evolves and advances to permit for it, the navy and authorities are investing in purposes related to medication, training, suicide prevention and extra.
Meant particularly for classroom coaching, the aptitude the Air Power is eyeing is what Blais and Melendez deemed to be “a extremely real looking, multi-process” welding simulator.
“For newbie to advanced-level weld college students, the digital welding system simulates a number of welding processes, mixing actual world and computer-generated pictures into a singular, digital actuality surroundings,” they wrote within the e-mail. “This know-how will enable the welders to coach with out using actual world sources, saving the Air Power a ton of cash!”
In keeping with a doc connected to the VR welder solicitation, officers desire a bodily software and digital program that leans on open-source code for system updates and instructor software program. The coaching instrument additionally wants to return with a VR welding helmet with outsized adjustable straps, a piece stand, and torch, amongst different options.
This yr’s Inland Northwest Spark Tank Competitors was hosted in February — this time by the model new Fairchild Innovation Cell throughout the base. Such cells are being established throughout the nation by the department and are basically designed to allow new alternatives round collaboration and innovation.
The annual contest is supposed to drive airmen and ladies to think about and execute novel concepts to profit the power. Among the different high performers within the 2022 competitors included a stress vest, an built-in tech platform, and an engine preservation equipment.
Whereas Pentagon parts at occasions battle with transitioning revolutionary applied sciences from idea to extensive use by navy personnel, this solicitation demonstrates how competitions like Spark Tank maintain some promise to bridge that hole.
“The Inland Spark Tank competitors can result in new purchases when the Airmen of Fairchild AFB have revolutionary concepts that may assist higher the Air Power,” Blais and Melendez wrote to FedScoop.
Responses to the RFQ are due Might 10.
