Augmented Command and Control Table to Support Network-Centric Operations

The success in network-centric warfare requires information superiority to obtain dominant battlespace awareness. The time required to take a decision has been reduced by orders of magnitude, while the volume of accessible data has been increased exponentially. When this volume is displayed to an operator, the risk of reaching a state of information overload is real and great care shall be taken to make sure that what is provided is actually information and not noise. In this paper we propose a novel interaction environment that leverages the augmented reality technology to provide a digitally enhanced view of a real command and control table. The operator equipped with an optical see-through head-mounted display controls the virtual context, a synthetic view of the common operational picture, remaining connected to the real world. Technical details of the system are described together with the evaluation method. The results showed effectiveness of the proposed system in terms of understanding perception, depth impression, and level of immersion. A relevant reduction of the reaction time and of the number of errors made during the execution of complex tasks, have been obtained