Vigilance Wins "People's Choice" Award At I/ITSEC Serious Games Competition
Orlando, FL - December 3, 2007 - The National Training Systems Association (NTSA) announced that Harrington Group's Vigilance won the prestigious "2007 People's Choice" award during the 2007 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge held at the Interservice/Industry Training Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando. Vigilance was selected from a field of nine finalists who in turn were chosen from entries submitted by over 50 companies.
The goal of the Serious Games Showcase & Challenge is to identify innovative game-based technologies and solutions that improve training for individuals as well as teams. Finalists were invited to showcase their serious games at I/ITSEC where over 16,000 attendees were able to view and vote on each of the finalists.
Vigilance was designed to help train U.S. military personnel to locate and identify Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). The Vigilance serious game mod was created using the state-of-the-art Crytek CryENGINE 2® 3D engine and the Scaleform GFx UI engine to create a nearly photo-realistic IED detection simulation.
"In order to prepare students to recognize and anticipate the minute details that may give away the position of an IED, Vigilance needed a toolset capable of building high-fidelity training environments in hours and days versus weeks or months. We had to provide an agile response to an asymmetrical threat. CryENGINE 2 and Scaleform GFx enabled the Harrington Group to deliver an unprecedented level of realism in the serious games/simulation space with minimal developer time and effort. We couldn't be happier with the results the Vigilance team was able to deliver" said John Brooks, Producer of Vigilance at Harrington Group.
CryENGINE 2 provides a new level of 3D graphics and immersion, along with a powerful set of rapid development tools that truly revolutionizes the way simulations are created. Crytek's Sandbox visual editing software allowed the Vigilance team to rapidly design training scenarios in response to changing insurgent tactics and then quickly test the results.
In addition, Scaleform GFx was used to facilitate the rapid production of interactive Flash based user interfaces in Vigilance. GFx combines the scalability and development ease of proven visual authoring tools such as Adobe Flash with the latest hardware graphics acceleration required by cutting-edge 3D applications.
Crytek CryENGINE and Scaleform GFx are new technologies that accelerate development and enable rapid response to changes in the field for advanced simulation and training applications like Vigilance.
About Harrington Group
Harrington Group is an advanced technology company that provides simulation and training solutions for a wide range of government, military and commercial customers. Leveraging various tools such as commercial gaming engines, Harrington Group produces highly effective3D, real time simulations to meet a wide range of training requirements. Harrington Group also is a pioneer and leading supplier of quality and business management software.
Located in the Harrington Center near Orlando's Central Florida Research Park, Harrington Group is a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business that was established in 1991.
For more information, please visit the Harrington Group website at www.harrington-group.com and the Vigilance website at www.iedvigilance.com.
About Crytek GmbH
Crytek GmbH ("Crytek") creators of the multiple award winning next-generation first person shooter Far Cry®, and the recently released blockbuster hit Crysis®, awarded as best PC Game of both E3 2007 and the 2007 Leipzig Games Convention, is an interactive entertainment development company with its headquarters located in Frankfurt Main, Germany and additional studios in Kiev, Ukraine and Budapest, Hungary. Crytek is dedicated to creating exceptionally high quality video games for the PC and next-generation consoles, powered by their proprietary cutting edge 3D-Game-Technology CryENGINE 2®. For more information about Crytek, please visit www.crytek.com. Development teams who are interested in obtaining a commercial license for the CryENGINE 2® middleware should mail their inquiries to cryengine@crytek.com.
About Scaleform
Scaleform Corporation is a leading provider of tools and middleware for the video game, embedded, and desktop markets. Scaleform licenses cross platform, hardware accelerated vector graphics engines and UI toolkits, which allow users to design, develop, and deploy a variety of interactive entertainment content across a wide range of platforms and formats. For more information, please visit www.scaleform.com.