Virtual planning rooms (ViPR): a 3D visualisation environment for hierarchical information

The Future Operations Centre Analysis Laboratory (FOCAL) at Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) is aimed at exploring new paradigms for situation awareness (SA) and command and control (C2) in military command centres, making use of new technologies developed for virtual reality and real-time 3D animation. Recent work includes the conceptual design and prototype development of the Virtual Planning Rooms (ViPR), an innovative visualisation environment that displays multi-media information on the walls of immersive virtual rooms. The operator is able to view and interact with relevant information within the octagonal rooms, and to explore different levels of abstraction or alternative data sets by navigating through doorways to adjoining rooms. Random accessibility throughout the environment is also possible via interaction with a 3D map representing a high level view of the data. Potential uses for ViPR include course-of-action visualisation, planning or display of other hierarchical data sets. This paper provides an overview of FOCAL, followed by a brief description of ViPR that includes its conceptual design and prototype development, together with future directions.