Researchers at RDECOM's Army Research Laboratory, the Army's corporate research laboratory (ARL), in collaboration with the University of Minnesota and the U.S. Army's Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, surveyed potential methods for assessing the usefulness of immersive systems in this industry.
The researchers also discussed ARL-developed Mixed Reality Tactical Analysis Kit, or MRTAK, which functions as an experimental platform to perform these assessments during collaborative mission planning and execution. MRTAK is now being developed as the mixed reality module of project AURORA (Accelerated User Reasoning for Operations, Research, and Analysis), as AURORA-MR. This serves as a test-bed to perform tightly controlled basic and applied research of multi-user decision making with distributed immersive systems.
According to Dr. Mark Dennison, research psychologist in ARL's Battlefield Information Processing Branch stationed at ARL West in Playa Vista, California, their work has often shown that researchers in this field have performed studies where collected data do not allow for useful metrics to be reported on, making it difficult or impossible for key decision-makers to determine how, when and where immersive technology provides any benefit or deficit to specific mission or task needs.
"We suggest a paradigm shift away from simply comparing non-immersive and immersive systems on similar tasks, and instead meticulously breaking down complex decision-making into component processes that can be more accurately modelled and compared across disparate display types," Dr. Dennison explained. "For example, when studying the planning of a tactical operation, such as the breach and clear of a hostile building, the same spatial information must be present in the 2D and VR experimental conditions to allow for precise quantitative comparisons.
According to the team, research conducted with AURORA-MR will enable the Soldier to understand when visualising and interacting with critical battlefield information might be best done in an immersive system, or in collaboration with others using traditional systems.
"Currently, we are evolving the network powering AURORA-MR, called AURORA-NET, to allow for greater control over the information that is sent and received by clients, while ensuring that the virtual environment is rendered at a comfortable frame rate to minimise the crippling effects of motion sickness on immersed users," Dr. Dennison said. "This will enable us to conduct research on how ingestion and analysis of data from noisy systems, such as the Internet of Battlefield Things, can be augmented through distributed collaboration in mixed reality."
