An Augmented Environment for Command and Control Systems

In the information age the ability to develop high-level situational awareness is essential for the success of any military operation. The power of network centric warfare comes from the linking of knowledgeable entities that allows information sharing and collaboration. By increasing the number of commanded platforms, the volume of the data that can be accessed grows exponentially. When this volume is displayed to an operator, there is an high risk to get a state of information overload and great care must be taken to make sure that what is provided is actually information and not noise. In this paper we propose a novel interaction environment that leverages the augmented reality technology to provide a digitally enhanced view of a real command and control table. The operator, equipped with an optical see-through head mounted display, controls the virtual context remaining connected to the real world. Technical details of the system are described together with the evaluation method. Twelve users evaluated the usability of the augmented environment comparing it with a wall-sized stereoscopic human computer interface and with a multi-screen system. Results showed the effectiveness of the proposed system in understanding complex electronic warfare scenarios and in supporting the decision-making process.