Operational Representations and Interactive Overlay Environment (ORION)

Tactical Commanders must successfully integrate and manage dynamic, time-sensitive battlefield information from large numbers of heterogeneous sources to perform their jobs effectively. While current tools enable distribution of large quantities and types of information, existing systems are not designed to adequately support the underlying cognitive work and information needs of decision makers. To address these needs, we propose to demonstrate and evaluate Operational Representations and Interactive Overlay Environment (ORION). This system combines tightly coordinated, advanced data visualizations for individual information exploration and reasoning with deeply integrated collaboration tools to provide a shared understanding of the battlespace. Combined, ORION effectively supports Tactical Commanders’ real-time information exploration, manipulation, and exploitation of resources within a flexible and role-tailored workspace. Under the proposed Phase II effort, we will expand a cognitive task analysis to address key informational requirements and processing activities across a range of decision makers. We will leverage the outputs of this analysis to extend and refine the design of ecological interfaces and interaction methods to support Tactical Commanders throughout the decision making process. Finally, we will expand the breadth and depth of the ORION prototype for demonstration and evaluation of information display tools and collaborative capabilities for the ORION system.