Red 6 Augmented Reality System Added to Golden Eagle Roadmap

The joint Lockheed/Korea Aerospace Industries T-50 aircraft will see the implementation of Red 6’s augmented reality technology to provide low-cost training solutions for the next-gen jet trainer.

Red 6’s Advanced Tactical Augmented Reality System (ATARS) suite received its official road map in the T-50 Golden Eagle program this week, kicking off a futuristic addition to a young defense program. The inclusion of ATARS will be helped along by Lockheed’s Prepar3D simulation software, allowing for affordable, fully virtual training experiences. Augmented reality remains uncommon in the industry, particularly in systems pulling so much weight in the learning process. If successful, though, T-50 operators will enjoy considerable cost savings, no longer requiring real, live assets for use in training. Every aggressor aircraft that stays on the ground saves thousands of dollars in every training sortie, every target-chasing cross country flight canceled saves even more. 

ATARS is a “multi-node, all-domain AR system that delivers a “complete outdoor synthetic training environment for multiple users,” allowing pilots to experience the full, demanding experience of flight while adding “realistic, scalable, training environments” right from their visor. If successful in providing everything it promises on the box, ATARS could be finding its way onto bigger Lockheed aircraft like the F-16 or F-35. (It could also prove to be far less amazing than it sounds, like so many whiz-bang products before it.)

"ATARS addresses the critical training inefficiencies in today's training platforms. There has never been a training environment in which you can combine virtual assets being visually represented in the real outdoor world, and the opportunity to overlay this training into ground-based training, until now," says Daniel Robinson, founder and CEO at Red 6. "One such example is continued integration with Red 6 as we look to build advanced 21st Century Security capabilities that support our customers' needs," Burnett continued. 

FMI: www.lockheedmartin.com