An Augmented Reality-based Software Architecture to Support Military Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness (SA) is the perception of our surrounding, comprehension of its meaning and projection of its status. The lack of SA is a causal factor in many military accidents. In this paper, Augmented Reality (AR) techniques are used to support SA and interaction in time-pressuring crisis situations. Firstly, existing military projects are reviewed. Then, the design of a military AR-based architecture as support to SA, called RAIOM (Augmented Reality for the identification of Military Objectives), is introduced and validated with real users considering traditional military scenarios. A distributed processing in a client-server architecture was implemented using an optical see-through AR glasses by the client side and a mini board by the server side. An AR application using the proposed AR architecture was deployed as an integrated proof of concept. The deployment was evaluated to measure the effectiveness, efficiency and usability of the AR software architecture in terms of three levels of SA such as perception, comprehension and projection. Different techniques were used in the evaluation such as User Testing, Thinking Aloud Protocol and SAGAT / SART. Also the User Experience (UX) was evaluated using UMUX questionnaire. The results were optimistic according to the degree of compliance of the SA got by the participants in the experiment.