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User interface design for military AR applications

  • SI: Augmented Reality
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Abstract

Designing a user interface for military situation awareness presents challenges for managing information in a useful and usable manner. We present an integrated set of functions for the presentation of and interaction with information for a mobile augmented reality application for military applications. Our research has concentrated on four areas. We filter information based on relevance to the user (in turn based on location), evaluate methods for presenting information that represents entities occluded from the user’s view, enable interaction through a top-down map view metaphor akin to current techniques used in the military, and facilitate collaboration with other mobile users and/or a command center. In addition, we refined the user interface architecture to conform to requirements from subject matter experts. We discuss the lessons learned in our work and directions for future research.

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Notes

  1. In keeping with practice for psychophysical experiments, we did not attempt to find domain experts to serve as subjects. Depth perception and relative depth judgments do not require military experience to perceive.

  2. http://www.lua.org.

  3. http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg.

  4. http://www.delta3d.org.

  5. http://qt.nokia.com/products.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the NRL Base Program and in part by DARPA under the ULTRA-Vis Program for work as a performing member of the Lockheed Martin team, contract # FA8650-09-C-7908.

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Correspondence to Mark A. Livingston.

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Livingston, M.A., Ai, Z., Karsch, K. et al. User interface design for military AR applications. Virtual Reality 15, 175–184 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-010-0179-1

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