Making information overload work: The dragon software system on a virtual reality responsive workbench

Gaining a detailed and thorough understanding of the modern battle space is vital to the success of any military operation. Military commanders have access to significant quantities of information which originate from disparate and occasionally conflicting sources and systems. Combining this information into a single, coherent view of the environment can be extremely difficult, error prone and time consuming. In this paper we describe the Naval Research Laboratory's Virtual Reality Responsive Workbench (VRRWB) and Dragon software system which together address the problem of battle space visualization. The VRRWB is a stereoscopic 3D interactive graphics system which allows multiple participants to interact in a shared virtue environment and physical space. A graphical representation of the battle space, including the terrain and military assets which lie on it, is displayed on a projection table. Using a six degree of freedom tracked joystick, the user navigates through the environment and interacts, via selection and querying, with the represented assets and the terrain. The system has been successfully deployed in the Hunter Warrior Advanced Warfighting Exercise and the Joint Countermine ACTD Demonstration One. In this paper we describe the system and its capabilities in detail, discuss its performance in these two operations, and describe the lessons which have been learned.