Redefining Image Generation

Mantis™ is the "Open-Platform" software Image Generator (IG) that provides the most effective utilization of existing hardware, for exceptional image quality and extremely high frame rate performance.

MANTIS FEATURES Special Effects Flexible Host Interface Ephemeris Math Models Time of Day Weather Support: Rain, Fog, Haxe, and Dust Scene Load Management Multi-head Frame Synchronization Terrain Database Support including TerraPage Mission Function Support: LOS, HAT, & HOT Open Standards Light Points Sensors Modes: IR, NVG

Mantis offers an innovative new approach for designing, building, and deploying high-end visual simulation solutions. Unlike other IGs, Mantis offers a powerful, yet flexible Vis/Sim environment based upon plug-in technology. Mantis comes equipped with a suite of standard features that support communications functions, peripheral devices, displays, and multi-channel synchronization. The Mantis architecture supports traditional high-end IG features, including special effects, sensors, weather, and lighting, along with mission functions such as height-above-terrain and line-of-sight intersection testing. Features such as multi-head data and frame synchronization and dynamically paged terrain are all standard capabilities of Mantis.

The Mantis Advantage
Mantis' highly optimized architecture is tuned to exceed the performance requirements of today's IGs and to meet the challenges of tomorrow. In addition to increasing application performance, faster smoother graphics provided by Mantis enables users to work at higher resolutions with higher frame rates across a wide variety of hardware platforms.

Mantis offers a powerful feature set that is both versatile and extensible. With capabilities such as time-of-day and weather effects, Mantis is proving to be on the leading-edge of image generation technologies. As Mantis is designed to work with plug-ins that offer additional capabilities, its features are easily extended. viXsen, the first plug-in, offers real-time sensor effects that are correlated with the out the window view.

The Mantis Architecture
Mantis has a scalable client/server architecture to enable separation of the simulation processing from the graphics processing; enabling tremendous performance levels to be achieved. With this architecture, the MantisClient application provides all graphical control information to MantisServer, which generates the graphical content for the display channel. Communication between MantisClient and MantisServer can take place across single or multiple communication interfaces such as TCP and reflective memory. Combined with the user's application MantisClient, and MantisServer provide a complete IG solution.

The MantisServer
The MantisServer generates the graphical content for the display channel(s), providing 3D visualization for a client. Mantis channels can be configured to meet visualization requirements efficiently, minimize cost, and maximize performance. From the MantisServer GUI, a user can set the server application parameters such as communication ports, file cache, available plug-ins and client inclusion and exclusion.

Multiple Server Scalability
Mantis' truly scalable architecture can be configured for standalone operations (single client/single server) or as a single client/multiple server configuration. Using a single MantisClient to provide information to multiple MantisServers means that a consistent data set is available, thereby guaranteeing accuracy across the views.

The MantisClient
The MantisClient application provides all graphical control information to MantisServer, which generates the graphical content for the display channel. User simulation applications need only interface with mantisClient to obtain image generation of their simulation. MantisClient setup involves specifying communications configuration with servers, channel configuration, visual behavior, and eyepoint behavior.