Some people just want to sit in the best seat in the house. Others actually want to create it. Take Mike Abernathy.
Abernathy runs a small company, called Rapid Imaging Software, or RIS, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Only five employees. Though they have an office at Kirtland Air Force Base, they often work right from their homes.
RIS is small. But, they have successfully accomplished very big things. And, in very smart ways.
Abernathy feels their size is one of their strengths.
In the development of some technical ideas a very small highly motivated team which is not distracted by many other things is able to make
much faster progress than an army of people plodding through mountains of paperwork.
RIS has been developing software since the mid 1980s. Their mission was to put a scientific visualization program on a PC,
making it easier to own and easier to use for a lot more people. It was in the mid 1990s when things began to take off for RIS literally.
At the time, they started to work on a software product line called Land Form.
Land Form allows users to fly a vehicle through virtual terrain with very unique visual enhancements.
Originally, LandForm was designed with environmental and civil engineers in mind,
but RIS discovered that one of their biggest customers was NASA.
The company found that the software was suited for other applications. Specifically, flight visualization.
Enter the Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, program.
With NASA already using their software, RIS felt they could provide something NASA needed.
We had a vision of being able to create a toolkit that would allow NASA engineers and
ultimately commercial engineers to be able to put a flight visualization system inside their application.
With funding through an SBIR award from Johnson Space Center, RIS developed a new version of Land Form, called SmartCam3D.
SmartCam3D takes flight video and overlays three-dimensional geographical information,
which then enhances the video and also provides a safety measure for the pilot and the vehicle.
The software requires no special hardware and runs on inexpensive computers, making it highly portable and inexpensive.
RIS has done what it set out to do--take complicated software and made it easy to use: on a desktop set with a click and drag interface.
This got NASA's attention, and teaming with NASA was perfect for RIS.
The reason that NASA is such an important partner for this they are some of the few people around that do experiments with flight.
SmartCam3D has been used by NASA astronauts to pilot an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV, known as the X-38.
The cameras on board the X-38 provided the video, and the graphics came from Geographical Information System
or GIS, data, as the astronauts flew the UAV from a remote cockpit on the ground.
The primary benefit for us lay in the fact that we were able to test our software on flying aircraft.
There are very few other places in the world that we could do that and no place that has the quality of resources
and the understanding of flight that NASA has.
Abernathy is very excited because the company software is not just a NASA success. It's also an outside success.
The company works with customers, like the Canadian Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration
to develop the most appropriate interface to fit their needs.
When the NASA astronauts were flying the X-38 model, they suggested that the company consider applications for other UAVs.
Today, RIS is working with the U. S, Army, to flight test of the Army's Shadow tactical UAV using RIS software.
Abernathy has set goals for what his company can accomplish.
And, he believes that some of the best seats in the house will use RIS software in the future.
We're going to have the opportunity to take this technology that we have
developed doing something we love and then infuse that into commercial sector.
People eventually flying, riding in airliners across the country or flying small general aviation
aircraft which I predict we are going to see a little upswing in that part of aviation are
going to be deriving the benefits of this technology for years to come.