Visualization for situation awareness

We explore techniques from visualization and computational geometry to make tactical information more intuitive to a military commander. To be successful, the commander must quickly grasp, and react to, changes in the evolving battle. Thus the commander must possess good situation awareness (SA). A particular problem is to reduce the information complexity entailed by understanding the positional and evolutionary potential of the many individual entities (micro states), each with its own organizational allegiance, capabilities, and attributes. The challenge is to combine the many individual microstates into a few integrated macrostates and then display this information to the commander in a way that is instantly meaningful. To improve the acquisition of SA, we apply principles of human visual perception. In particular, we exploit the organizational properties of gestalt figures and the phenomenon of global preference to create displays that allow the commander to quickly find and in...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: NPIV
• Authors: C. M. Hoffman, Y.-J. Kim, R. P. Winkler, J. D. Walrath, P. J. Emmerman
• Keywords: Computational Geometry, Geometric Density Assignment, Military Commander, NPIV 1998, Visualization