User interface design for military AR applications

• Published in: Virtual reality : the journal of the Virtual Reality Society Vol. 15; no. 2-3; pp. 175 - 184
• Main Authors: Livingston, Mark A., Ai, Zhuming, Karsch, Kevin, Gibson, Gregory O.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Springer-Verlag 01.06.2011; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Augmented reality; Commands; Computer Graphics; Computer Science; Image Processing and Computer Vision; Metaphors; Military; Military applications; Mobile communications networks; Position (location); SI: Augmented Reality; Situational awareness; User interface; User interfaces; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Virtual reality; Mobile systems; Evaluation; User interface; Interaction; Augmented reality
• ISSN: 1359-4338; 1434-9957
• DOI: 10.1007/s10055-010-0179-1

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.