Visualization for situation awareness
C. M. Hoffman, Y.-J. Kim, R. P. Winkler, James D. Walrath, Philip J. Emmerman · 1998
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 integrate relevant information on the location, identity, and concentration of friendly and enemy units.We postulate that an appropriate technical translation of this psychological concept is to consider the spatial arrangement of the units as a geometric density assignment problem, based, to the first order, on geometric proximity.The resulting density and clustering of units is represented using color.To further enhance the ability to grasp the evolving dynamics of an engagement, we compress the data into a short temporal sequence of images.For example, several days of maneuver may be compressed into a motion sequence of a few minutes.We report preliminary findings focusing on the computational geometry aspects, and on the visualization requirements.