Concepts for the Integrated Visualization of Effects (CONCEIVE)

As Air Operations Centers (AOCs) expand their capabilities by integrating space and cyberspace information into the air domain, the influx of relevant data must be presented to avoid information overload while enabling shorter planning cycles as well as an increasing variety of effects on an assortment of targets.  Novel visualization techniques will be critical to ensure rapid comprehension of the current status and depict both kinetic and non-kinetic activities and their relationships to desired effects. These visualizations must seamlessly integrate network effects, health, and status with traditional operational data, even though these data sources may not be correlated in space and time. Beyond the ad-hoc creation of visualization devices, what is needed is a sound methodology with which system capabilities can be systematically matched with user needs and novel visualization designs can emerge. SIFT proposes to combine a novel adaptable automation design approach with Ecological Interface Design (EID) methods (with low cognitive processing requirements) from Human-Computer Interaction to create visualizations which provide the right the information to the right people all of the time to enhance situation awareness, improve decisions and speed task execution with little or no additional human effort. BENEFIT: The proposed work will develop advanced methodologies for designing visualizations. These methodologies are relevant to a variety of application domains where distributed data sources and teams with different views of the same goals must be coordinated, and where frequent changes that affect various components differently are part of the nature of the work environment.  Such circumstances are common in process control, supply chains, Emergency Medical Services (EMS), and of course, military applications. There are many immediate commercialization opportunities within the military domain for the results of this project.  One is the direct application to the user interface needs of joint air, space, and cyberspace command and control centers.  Upon completion of this program, we will be in an excellent position to ensure compatibility of our UI designs with technologies to realize Joint Vision 2020.