(FRANKFURT GERMANY / ORLANDO FL) - 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’s CryENGINE® 2 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.

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