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Prof. Tobias Höllerer has received a grant of $320,461 from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to support the deployment of a high-fidelity Mixed Reality (MR) simulator in the UCSB AlloSphere.

This instrumentation grant, awarded to PI Tobias Höllerer (UCSB CS), Co-PI Doug Bowman (Virginia Tech), and senior key person Matthew Wright (UCSB Media Arts and Technology), funds the deployment of a high-fidelity Mixed Reality (MR) simulator in the UCSB AlloSphere, a three-story immersive facility for large-scale simulation, data visualization, and multimodal data representation. The enabled work is geared towards improving the effectiveness of immersive training capabilities. Military training using immersive or partially immersive training systems has been one of the most successful applications of mixed reality (MR) technologies, encompassing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). MR systems can provide realistic first-person views of a controlled world with real and synthetic elements, and allow trainees to interact directly with that world, making these systems useful for training important procedures and skills, including but not limited to equipment use, motor skills, tactical skills, decision-making, team communication, and navigation. However, there is a wide range of AR/VR technologies with a wide range of costs (in all categories of equipment, development, deployment, and maintenance), and very little is known about which technologies provide the most benefit (and best cost-benefit ratio) for various training scenarios. In order to achieve the best return on investment, the Navy needs empirical data on the effectiveness of VR technologies.

The proposed instrumentation will enable controlled empirical studies of immersive trainer design decisions in a multi-person surround-view simulation setting and thus significantly extend the basic and applied research capabilities of the Mixed Reality simulation efforts at UCSB and Virginia Tech, whose research groups will have direct control of and access to the instrumentation, respectively.