Visualizing Electromagnetic Spectrum Phenomena in Augmented Reality
(Room 320A)
04 Dec 19
2:30 PM
-
3:00 PM
Tracks:
Full Schedule, Wednesday Schedule
The Tactical Decision Kit (TDK), developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), contains hardware and software components that allow users to rapidly create ultra-realistic geospecific terrain models and visualize them as holograms on the Microsoft HoloLens via an application called SandTable. An early experiment in the development of the TDK involved the incorporation of a radio-frequency (RF) propagation model called Sandbar into the SandTable application. This enabled several electromagnetic (EM) phenomena such as probability of detection and received signal strength to be visualized on the SandTable's terrain models in the form of color-coded semi-transparent overlays. Early demonstrations of this capability have garnered a tremendous amount of interest from multiple groups within the military, as it provides a unique way to visualize RF phenomena which are normally invisible, allowing insight into a unit's RF footprint as well as its ability to intercommunicate. During the development of the EM overlay capability within the SandTable, various challenges were encountered associated with running computationally intensive models on a non-tethered device with a relatively weak CPU. Novel techniques were developed in order to overcome these challenges, including shifting some of the computational burden from the CPU to the GPU, and offloading other computations to a powerful remote PC. This paper details the development of the spectrum operations capability within the SandTable application, and explores the techniques that were employed to overcome the aforementioned challenges.