Virtual environment debriefing room for naval fighter pilots: phase I

Current methods for debriefing Navy Fighter Pilots after real and simulated missions are insufficient for handling the speed and complexity of modern air combat. The state of the art in tactical air combat debriefing is essentially a two-dimensional plus time view of a problem whose dimensionality consists of three spatial dimensions plus time plus other non-spatial parameters. The David Sarnoff Research Center (Sarnoff) is developing an advanced debriefing system for Navy fighter jet training, combat development, and research. Called CyberView, the system consists of an advanced interactive data visualization system displaying multi-dimensional abstract and concrete combat data in three-dimensions plus time, an interactive data analysis system for rapid data manipulation and studies, and a faster than real-tie predictive simulation based on the branch wargaming paradigm of military planning for 'what if?' analysis. In our research and development of CyberView, we are attempting to give pilots and battle planners greater awareness of the complex situations which occur during air operations, and the ability to look into the future at the effects of decisions on battle outcomes. Our envisioned system when complete will be capable of intuitively displaying combat errors to pilots, permitting the pilots to re-fight the same battles with better awareness of their situation, giving battle planners the ability to perform tradeoff studies on tactical decisions in order to optimize battle outcomes, and providing an analytical testbed for automated forces paradigms, algorithms, and effectiveness.