Augmented reality as a visualisation tool within information visualisation

• Authors: Hannah Slay;Jill Slay
• Venue: SAICSIT '02 Proceedings of the 2002 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on Enablement through technology
• Year: 2002

Command and Control (C2), an integral part of InformationWarfare, is focused on the use of communications and computersystems to allow all kinds of warfare to be won. A major issuedfaced by military decision makers involved in C2 is the need torespond quickly to complex battle situations during a time ofconflict. Military commanders operate within an historicallyhierarchical management structure, which now depends heavily onnetwork-based information systems. Often the technical skills andexpertise necessary to operate complex systems now reside muchlower down the chain-of-command so that military leaders themselvescannot access or interpret the complex information that isgathered. Working internationally poor language skills are often abarrier and to aid decision making, data must be presented in anappropriate form keeping this in mind.One mechanism for displaying abundant amounts of disparateinformation is through information visualization[Goodburn 1999], exploiting the natural abilities of the user torapidly understand, analyse and evaluate information displayed in agraphical form. A vast number of approaches and formats are used ininformation visualisation. It can be used to represent an entitywith a physical form, as well as to model synthetic systems such assoftware systems and intranets [Pattison et al 2001]. An advantageof computer-based visualisation is that the underlying informationthat the information visualisation views are created from can bevery generic. The description of the information displayed can bemade very flexible, allowing the user to interact with the systemand change the description to suit their circumstances. The usercan change the description and the new model can be generated in anear real-time response. Allowing the user to explore the differentparts of the model. This paper describesInVision, a component based visualisationenvironment developed by the Defence Science and TechnologyOrganisation and its research partners, to investigate a range ofissues related to the rapid assembly and deployment of adaptivevisualisation systems. Issues being investigated include viewmanagement and sharing, novel visualization approaches andintelligent agent support.Augmented Reality (AR) refers to the processof overlaying computer-generated images spatially registered to thereal world, allowing users to visualize three-dimensional virtualobjects in the real world and interact with them in a natural way.By using a head mounted display placed on the user's head it ispossible to completely replace the user's view of the real worldwith this computer-enhanced world. ARVIS is a C based applicationdesigned to investigate new interaction techniques in AR. Itprovides the user with mechanisms for direct manipulation andcommand input of virtual objects. The users can not only displaythree-dimensional models on fiducial markers, but also interactwith them. This interaction allows the user to both select parts ofthe models, to change their attributes, and to manipulate theselected components. When parts of models are selected, the user isalso able to map a translation onto the selected components. Thispaper describes an AR view capability that was added as anextension to InVision with components that allowany of the views in an InVision workspace to bedisplayed through an AR tangible interface, incorporating ARVIS asa component into the InVision framework.