Virtual Environment Collaboration Tools for Operational Readiness (VECTOR)

Mission Command (MC) is a core principle and philosophy of the US Army; however, burdens posed by cumbersome, complex legacy command posts make them infeasible for future expeditionary MC. Increased MC dispersion and stakeholder distribution will inherently increase demand for effective collaboration tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), mediated through advanced technology to ensure both situational awareness and common ground. Significant advances to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)—collectively extended reality (XR)—technologies, mobile computing power, and US Army expeditionary network connectivity has created an opportunity for MC collaboration to extend beyond traditional methods (e.g., voice and video teleconferencing). To take advantage of these opportunities and provide MC Commanders and staff with enhanced SA and common ground to drive effective distributed and dispersed collaboration, Charles River Analytics designed, prototyped, and demonstrated feasibility of Virtual Environment Collaboration Tools for Operational Readiness (VECTOR) under a Phase I effort. VECTOR provides a network and application architecture designed to support dispersed and distributed MC execution through synchronized virtual collaboration environments (VCEs). Our Phase I results include: (1) an open and extensible software architecture to support synchronous multiuser virtual MC using a Reachback Server, Expeditionary Servers, and Client applications; (2) a contextually-configured 3D geospatial common operating picture supporting XR head-mounted displays (HMDs), Android mobile devices, and Windows PCs; (3) prototype virtual MC collaboration mechanisms; and (4) a performance-based evaluation of technical feasibility. Based on the success of our Phase I effort, Charles River Analytics proposes a Phase II effort to refine, enhance, apply, and evaluate a full-scope VECTOR system, and pursue transition and commercialization into relevant operational MC environments. Our Phase II prototype will consist of effective XR visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI), and collaboration capabilities to support selected distributed MC tasks. VECTOR provides foundational capabilities to improve situational awareness (SA) and performance by enabling enhanced collaboration, compressed decision cycles, and enhanced ability to discern and resolve the spatiotemporal relationships of a battlespace. By facilitating integrated visualization of multi-domain elements and remote collaboration combined with intelligent denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited (DDIL) degradation, VECTOR is ideal to support future multi-domain operations. To ensure the development of our full-scope VECTOR prototype is operationally grounded and achieves TRL 6, we will identify relevant information and decision support solutions that will benefit from integration with XR collaboration capabilities, such that we can tailor the VECTOR approach to achieve technology transition