Primary Investigator : Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira

Co-Pis: Dr. Dirk Reiners, Dr. Christoph Borst, Dr. Henry Chu, Dr. Ramesh Kolluru, Dr. Claude Cech

Students: Vinay Kumar Bayya, David Ducrest, B. Meghna Uthaiya

Funding source: Army Research Laboratory

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This project focuses on advancing the technology supporting the simulation and training activities at ARL HRED. Specifically, the project centers on the integration of the 3rd generation omni-directional treadmill (ODT) into immersive environments. The integration involves developing a CAVE-like projection structure, hardware and software development for the rapid creation of training scenarios, capturing soldier’s data as he/she is performing the exercises, and provide support for the analysis of this data.

This project will significantly contribute to the advancement of modeling and simulation tools necessary to capture, analyze, and evaluate data resulting from human factors experiments on the dismounted soldier. Ultimately, these tools will enhance the Army’s ability to gain insight about the cognitive processes of dismounted soldiers when placed in situations of high stress and quick decision-making.

The project has four primary research tracks:

• Creation of new projection system guided for low-cost, good quality: This research area will target the R&D efforts to develop an integrated CAVE-like projection system that is easy to maintain, low-cost with main stream components.
• Infrastructure: This research area relates to investigate and design a solid infrastructure for the ARL group to integrate the Omni-directional treadmill into an immersive simulation environment, as well as the integration of other devices that will be able to capture soldier’s actions, vital signs and other data. Furthermore, the infrastructure should address the interconnectivity of multiple immersive environments (CAVEs) for group training. The project includes the following sub-projects:
  • Design of an immersive environment framework for the rapid development of training scenarios, visual database integration, and different training strategies.
  • Networked collaborative spaces to integrate multiple CAVEs into a single virtual space
  • Integration of user-interfaces and interaction techniques to better replicate the training environment, as well as for better visualization of soldier’s actions, and factors that affect his decisions in the battlefield.
• Scenario generation and management: This area focuses on the investigation of techniques for the rapid creation of scenarios, terrains, targets, and other elements that define the battlefield. These techniques can generate simulations of actual places or computer-generated places with characteristics similar to known places. The ability to define training exercises is also part of this research area. The subprojects involved here are:
  • Automatic terrain/landscape scenario utilizing procedural techniques based on parameters that define the environment characteristics
  • Real environment reconstruction from satellite, aerial, or ladar data
  • Scripting and visualization of training exercises, as well as the recording of all the activities/actions/events that occur on the training exercise
  • Playback/review of exercises in the immersive space.
• Dismounted soldier performance: Here we investigate issues related to cognitive load on the dismounted soldier and his ability to make split-second decisions while processing all the information that is coming to him. The subprojects are:
  • Cognitive load simulation by capturing the different types of information that a dismounted soldier receives at the battlefield. This will require the definition of a protocol for data capturing, data storage, data processing and synthesis. This will require high performance computing and storage
  • Analysis of the cognitive load from a human factors and psychology perspectives to identify information bottlenecks, information confusion, sources of miss interpretation, with the goal of identifying more efficient forms to bring information to the soldier.

Information about projection system:

The ODT PIs designed and built a low-cost, good quality CAVE-like space utilizing off-the-shelf components and limiting the overall cost of the system to under $50K. The system uses the DepthQ projectors from LightSpeedDesign, Stewart screens, standard 80/20 material and Dell graphics workstations. The entire team of faculty, research scientists, and students contributed to the assembly of the system as can be seen in the pictures in the Gallery.

*The ODT’s Grand Opening was on March 16^th, during the Evening Reception of the IEEE VR 2009 conference, which was held in Lafayette LA.