This paper discusses our usability engineering process for the Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS). Usability engineering is a structured, iterative, stepwise development process. Like the related disciplines of software and systems engineering, usability engineering is a combination of management principals and techniques, formal and semi- formal evaluation techniques, and computerized tools. BARS is an outdoor augmented reality system that displays heads- up battlefield intelligence information to a dismounted warrior. The paper discusses our general usability engineering process. We originally developed the process in the context of virtual reality applications, but in this work we are adapting the procedures to an augmented reality system. The focus of this paper is our work on domain analysis, the first activity of the usability engineering process. We describe our plans for and our progress to date on our domain analysis for BARS. We give results in terms of a specific urban battlefield use case we have designed.
KEYWORDS: Visualization, Systems modeling, Volume rendering, Computing systems, Image quality, 3D modeling, Databases, Control systems, Coastal modeling, Data modeling
A stable frame rate is important for interactive rendering systems. Image-based modeling and rendering (IBMR) techniques, which model parts of the scene with image sprites, are a promising technique for interactive systems because they allow the sprite to be manipulated instead of the underlying scene geometry. However, with IBMR techniques a frequent problem is an unstable frame rate, because generating an image sprite (with 3D rendering) is time-consuming relative to manipulating the sprite (with 2D image resampling). This paper describes one solution to this problem, by distributing an IBMR technique into a collection of cooperating threads and executable programs across two computers. The particular IBMR technique distributed here is the LOD-Sprite algorithm. This technique uses a multiple level-of-detail (LOD) scene representation. It first renders a keyframe from a high-LOD representation, and then caches the frame as an image sprite. It renders subsequent spriteframes by texture-mapping the cached image sprite into a lower-LOD representation. We describe a distributed architecture and implementation of LOD-Sprite, in the context of terrain rendering, which takes advantage of graphics hardware. We present timing results which indicate we have achieved a stable frame rate. In addition to LOD-Sprite, our distribution method holds promise for other IBMR techniques.
Conference Committee Involvement (8)
Visualization and Data Analysis 2010
18 January 2010 | San Jose, California, United States
Visualization and Data Analysis 2009
19 January 2009 | San Jose, California, United States
Visualization and Data Analysis 2008
28 January 2008 | San Jose, California, United States
Visualization and Data Analysis 2007
29 January 2007 | San Jose, CA, United States
Visualization and Data Analysis 2006
16 January 2006 | San Jose, California, United States
Visualization and Data Analysis 2005
17 January 2005 | San Jose, California, United States
Visualization and Data Analysis 2004
19 January 2004 | San Jose, California, United States
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