MilSim and AR and an Easy-to-Implement Standard

Hello All,

I'm a newcomer to the AR arena. I work at a radar company where our primary
market is US government, but I've really been wanting to see what
commercial applications there are in the AR / MilSim world - mostly because
I believe that if we cater to the commercial world we'll have a much better
product that is easier to use than catering to the overly-complicated and
quasi-restricted standards that exist in the government.

And also because I've also got a friend in professional paintball who is
also a software dev and interested in using our radar at some of his
tournaments - a great first use-case for a truly commercial API for our
product.

For the type of positioning information we provide the W3C / Apple / Google
/ HTML5 standards look pretty good, but also fairly incomplete for
describing 3-dimentional space and inconclusive. For example: there's
disagreement about what `bearing` and `compassHeading` means - whether they
mean magnetic reading or relative to true north or if declination should be
included, etc... and they have a 20-year window to finalize the spec...

Then I started searching for AR standards and came across stuff like
SensorML and Sensor Observation Service, that although are probably pretty
descriptive, look like they're designed to take a month to read through and
then be implemented only in Java (Markup/XML-based), not the current web
technologies - JavaScript, Ruby, Python (Object Notation/JSON-based). Not
much better than the military stuff.

Then I started creating my own standard, MILSON (http://milson.org), which
is based on the W3C stuff, but more clearly and logically defined for the
use cases that come to my mind.
But before I'm too far along the dark path (http://xkcd.com/927), I'd like
to get some feedback from the larger community that has been working with
this stuff longer.

A) Are there existing standards that would be appropriate for a new age of
MilSim (paintball, airsoft, war games) with homebrew (or professional)
sensors like lego mindstorms, arduino shields, AR drones, etc that works
well in a web browser and with modern languages? Something I should be
using instead of rolling my own?

B) If not, any feedback on the direction MILSON is headed? Perhaps more
conventional names to use to describe 3-d positioning and orientation than
what I'm using?

Thanks,

-- 
AJ ONeal

Received on Saturday, 19 May 2012 05:34:42 UTC