Mobile Augmented Reality: Applications and Human Factors Evaluations

Recent trends in military operations (quick-reaction forces, putting fewer warfighters at risk, and increasing the use of unmanned vehicles) have increased the difficulty in acquiring and maintaining situation awareness (SA). Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to meet some of these new challenges. AR systems integrate computer-generated graphics (or annotations) with the user’s view of the real world. These annotations can be cues to establish and maintain SA, or they can provide virtual opposing forces (OPFOR) for training scenarios. However, the design of the user interface of a mobile AR system presents a unique set of technical challenges. The interface must be capable of automatically deciding what annotations need to be shown. Furthermore, it must select the characteristics of those annotations (including appearance, size, and drawing style) to ensure the display is intuitive and unambiguous. In the training applications, the virtual OPFOR must appear and behave realistically. We discuss the development of our augmented reality system and the human factors testing we have performed. We apply the system to two military needs: situation awareness during operations and training.