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 and virtual 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 proposes a Phase I effort to design, prototype, and demonstrate the feasibility of Virtual Environment Collaboration Tools for Operational Readiness (VECTOR). VECTOR provides a network and application architecture designed to support dispersed and distributed MC execution through the use of synchronized virtual collaboration environments (VCEs). Users can join VCEs using a variety of different XR, mobile, and desktop peripherals, and once in a session have a suite of collaboration capabilities to drive effective collaboration.