CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A16-038

Description

In recent years, Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have supported users in a variety of domains to enable enhanced situation awareness (SA) and improved decision making. To date, however, no AR approaches have been developed to support Mission Command (MC), despite the importance of MC to all Army missions. To apply AR in support of MC, Charles River Analytics proposes to research, define requirements for, and design and develop prototype Mission Command Augmented Reality Technologies to enhance Human User Readiness (MCARTHUR). First, we will conduct a Focused MC Work Domain Analysis to iteratively develop an inventory of the procedures, skills, and competencies relevant to situational awareness for MC. Second, we will conduct a Scoped AR Trade Study to catalog relevant insights into how humans perceive AR displays, the strengths and limitations of available display platforms and which HCI techniques have been successful for given tasks and contexts. Finally, we will develop a Geospatial AR Prototyping Environment to allow AR designers to quickly design and evaluate visualization and HCI techniques that can be readily transitioned across AR platforms as that technology evolves, and support demonstrations of targeted proof-of-concept MC ARapplications.