The IMA Development Test Grid may change periodically dependent on the needs of ongoing development. Currently, only administrators and developers have local accounts planned. When this grid is live, we will update this page on how to participate.

Initially, the IMA Development Grid will be a unique IMA fork of the former Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy (MOSES) fork of Halcyon with security fixes from the MOSES team and optimization to support up to 200 concurrent avatars per region. Part of this fork includes optimization of a Freeswitch voice server which IMA intends to extend to make virtual worlds more accessible by implementing a module with Text to Speech (TTS) and Speech to Text (STT) capabilities. We also intend to support an ongoing effort to port the NVIDIA PhysX solution to Linux eliminating the need for costly Microsoft licensing as a part of our roadmap.

The former MOSES project was funded by the US Army Research Lab in conjunction with the Institute for Simulation and Training (IST) division of the University of Central Florida (UCF). In 2017, the former MOSES project resources were transitioned to UCF's IST and data from the project is being captured by researchers at UCF with respect to the Camp Blanding experiments. The final experiments conducted by the MOSES team used the above configuration which will be available in parallel to support UCF efforts. Additional work planned includes security issues and development of a software bridge to integrate Halcyon, Open Simulator, and WhiteCore-sim grids so that avatars can travel between them in a secure fashion and creators can feel confident their intellectual property concerns are addressed. All of this work also relates to standards development by IMA and work to bring code into compliance.

Extensive development of next-next generation software towards what we like to call the Infinite Metaverse is planned beyond this implementation and includes coordinating support with existing development teams for Open Simulator, Halcyon, and WhiteCore-sim as well as various viewer development team efforts. This will not replace or direct any existing team roadmaps of course. But we hope IMA will have a complementary development roadmap as well as an end-user community focused roadmap that supports all of the teams.