VR Search Visualization

ALYSSA KUTNEY, BROOKE L. BROWN, BRETT KWAK, JUSTIN A. DAVIS, PATRICK M. MACMILLAN, and

DANIEL B. WALLACE

As security becomes a greater and greater issue for people today, there is an increasing need for enhanced radarbased systems that can quickly detect possibly hostile objects in proximity to an asset. Any detection system could have a false positive, i.e., something on a visualization system could simply be an anomaly. The purpose of our research is to detect targets through a virtual reality search visualization. This system will detect targets through data files that are streamed in through a communications channel designed to process the information line by line. The objective of this research is to implement a Search Beam that will scan a specified area within a given time interval. This Search Beam will detect targets, such as planes or missiles, within the area searched as accurately as possible. The visualization should conform to human-computer interaction principles to make it easy for operators to focus on areas of critical importance. This can be accomplished via an algorithm that can modify in real time the transparency of an object based on certain heuristics. Interestingly, one can turn to the technology of the gaming industry for a solution to this problem. We explored the capabilities of integrating the Unity3D game engine supplemented by code written in C#. Once this research is complete, a VR search visualization tool should be able to stream in data files, detect targets and their information, warn users about invalid data, and eventually be used with virtual reality systems.