RTO-TR-HFM-121-Part-II - FTP Directory Listing - NATO

Introduction
The alliance is facing new challenges, including extended areas of operation, peace support missions,
and combating-terrorism issues. To meet the associated military requirements, innovative concepts and
technologies for an efficient and effective utilization of military forces with a limited manning level have
to be developed.
Military operators usually have to interact with highly complex C4ISR systems and weapon systems under
high physical, mental, and emotional workload. Therefore, the ergonomic design of human-system
interaction is a critical issue. HFM-021/RSG-028 on “Human Factors in Virtual Environments” has
identified Virtual Reality (VR) and Virtual Environment (VE) systems to be advantageous in facilitating a
close, natural, and intuitive interaction by making better use of human perceptive, cognitive, and motor
capabilities (RTO-TR-018). It was summarized, that VEs have become a useful technology for early
phases of systems engineering like virtual product prototyping. Moreover, innovative approaches to
integrate VEs into military mission support were identified.
But whereas computing, rendering, and display technologies have made a tremendous advance in recent
years, the ergonomic design of the human-system interface has not. As a matter of fact, VE systems have
to be operated by specially trained personnel and applications are often limited to passive presentations.
User interfaces of VE systems are usually prototypic and are derived from common 2D graphical user
interfaces. VE systems are often used only as an extension of existing concepts without exploiting their
full interaction potential. Therefore, a significantly better integration into novel concepts for training,
system design as well as command and control is required.
The operator-interactive part of a virtual environment must take task dynamics into account and should
augment human perception, cognition, and decision making. It has to be systematically designed and
evaluated on pragmatic, semantic, syntactic, and lexical levels.
Possible military applications of such advanced and intuitive VE systems were found as:
• Dynamic, task-driven user interfaces for C4ISR systems;
• Telepresence, teleoperation, and telemanipulation in reconnaissance, surveillance, and target
acquisition;
• Realistic and distributed military simulation and training;
• Short-term mission preparation, including intended area of operation; and
• Mission support as wearable, augmenting technology for individual soldiers (including Mixed
Reality and Augmented Reality).
The Task Group was initiated in order to investigate Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Environments
(AMVE) as a mean of providing an advanced and intuitive human-system interaction for multiple military
applications and report on the state-of-the-art and its potential.
During its three years duration the group started updating and extending the results of past NATO RTO
Research Study Groups, especially of NATO HFM-021 on Human Factors in Virtual Reality. According
to the prior work of that group, the Task Group has adopted the following definition of the term Virtual
Reality:
“Virtual Reality is the experience of being in a synthetic environment and the perceiving and
interacting through sensors and effectors, actively and passively, with it and the objects in it, as if
they were real. Virtual Reality technology allows the user to perceive and experience sensory
contact and interact dynamically with such contact in any or all modalities.”
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