The what, why and how of achieving urban telepresence

Abstract

21st century advancements in information technology are enabling a powerful emerging capability known as Urban Telepresence (UT). This capability allows users to experience an operational environment (e.g. an urban cityscape) via an immersive, remote browser interface. UT operators can interact in real-time with personnel and sensor assets in that environment, and can derive comprehensive shared situational awareness (SA) from a mixed reality (i.e. live-over-virtual-over-time) augmentation of the environment with supporting intelligence, including past/present/forecast information. The deployment of UT capability becomes a force multiplier for military operations as well as civilian safety, security and emergency response. By providing on-scene sensor data registered into the virtual scene of the real environment, UT facilitates effective supervisory control of the sensors to follow situation dynamics, and creates powerful enhanced “overwatch” abilities. With super-human ability to change perspective and evaluate the scene both spatially and temporally, the “virtual operator” becomes a valued team member to personnel in the environment in real-time. In the future, UT will play a substantial role for missions in both non-cooperative (e.g. military) and cooperative (e.g, natural disaster response) environments. [ourDscape® four-dimensional (4D) browser/server technology is already deployed and providing enhanced situational awareness in homeland security applications, and is currently being leveraged by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) as a baseline technology for developing and evaluating a comprehensive Urban Telepresence integrated system and human-machine interface (HMI). Some of the important technical components of this UT capability include: an lmmersive, augmented virtual reality (AVR) environment providing an untethered perspective into the real-world operational environment; a naturalistic user interface for temporal-spatial navigation and information management; an effective HMI to perform supervisory control of manned/unmanned on-scene assets and sharing of vital information; and disparate multi-systems integration to develop a complete temporal-spatial 4D context for comprehensive shared situational awareness. In addition, a Testing/Training Methodology and simulation environment is being developed, combining both performance-based and knowledge-based measures of effectiveness (MoEs) techniques, which will evaluate the value UT adds to SA in an overwatch capacity.