Prof. Tobias Höllerer receives an Office of Naval Research grant for "View Management and User Interface Optimization for Wide-Area Mobile Augmented Reality"

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has awarded a grant to Professor Tobias Höllerer for his project titled "View Management and User Interface Optimization for Wide-Area Mobile Augmented Reality." ONR coordinates, executes, and promotes the science and technology programs of the United States Navy and Marine Corps.

Abstract
Building on our successful work on Mixed Reality Simulation and Augmented Reality (AR) simulation to enable informed design decisions for Naval training facilities, we propose a three-year research agenda on improving mobile AR views and user interfaces for providing wide-area AR users, and especially decision makers in the field, such as emergency managers and squad leaders, with superior tactical situation awareness. Our established infrastructures for prototyping and evaluating AR capabilities at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Virginia Tech (VT) will be utilized to demonstrate and evaluate view management and user interface options for emergency response scenarios. Our work aims to provide demonstrations of promising future capabilities, enabling reliable cost-benefit analysis and iterative design, including quantitative comparative evaluations before deployment. We will establish novel indoor and outdoor AR experimentation platforms at UCSB and VT and also utilize an established AR Simulation approach, testing variations of the planned AR elements as simulated in high-end controlled VR and AR environments. Having previously explored immersion factors for training applications, we will turn our attention to optimizing the user interface and augmentation experience for in-situ tactical operations.