Uncertainty Awareness for Battle Space Visualization Systems

A critical problem for military commanders and decision makers is to understand all of the relevant factors that must go into the assessment of a battle field situation. This problem is made exponentially more difficult by the fact that so many of thosefactors have an associated uncertainty level, which may or may not be known a priori. Creating effective visual tools for intuitively conveying this information along with its certainties to the battle field commander has a tremendous potential forincreasing the accuracy and outcome of military operations.Over the past decade there has been a massive increase in computer graphics capability, driven largely by the economics of the computer game industry. This increase in graphics processing power has also been accompanied by the new generation of real-timegraphics tools for generating Hollywood-style visual effects that can greatly enrich the display of information. Together, these have opened up new opportunities for another generation of visualization tools in general, and battle space visualizationsystems in particular.This research project proposes advanced visualization techniques that leverage modern graphics processing power; moving beyond simple polygons, texture mapping, and 3D to create a new class of visualization tools aimed at accurately conveying the certaintyof information in a battle space overview tool. Our ideas exploit animation, shading, illumination, and new visual techniques to overcome inherent human perceptual limitations. Although relatively new to battle space visualization, these approaches haveshown great progress in other domains. Taken together, our approach and the vastly more powerful graphics capabilities have great potential for dramatically improving our ability to understand information in the presence of uncertainty.