Ministry of Defense OBVIOUS Program

The Ministry of Defense (MoD) from a foreign government had a requirement to provide a visualization system based on COTS software products that could facilitate the generation of visualization databases for situational awareness.  This system would help them increase productivity by shortening database production time, as well as increase operational effectiveness, by allowing end users more flexibility in utilizing visualization databases for analysis than with previous approaches.

To bring the broader benefit of this unified, versatile imaging solution to the various groups and users dependant on this data, the MoD embarked on the OBVIOUS (Operations Backing Visualization for Interactive Optimization of User Scenarios) Program; a system for creating visualization databases, coordinating and disseminating them to various end users and allowing multiple levels of interactive visualization for modeling and simulations applications. 

Also part of OBVIOUS system capabilities is a suite of customized visual simulators or viewers.  These include:

• A simple viewer that will be widely distributed, and,
• An advanced viewer to be utilized by specialized users within the MoD Intelligence organization. 

The system also offers unique Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) that ease control and use of the viewers.

Presagis selected by Ministry of Defense

The MoD contracted Presagis Technical Services to provide the system and selected the Presagis Vega Prime SDK as the visualization engine behind OBVIOUS. 

Vega Prime is a flexible extensible tool designed for creating and deploying visual simulation, multi-domain simulation, and general visualization applications.  The powerful Vega Prime API can be harnessed for visualization and analysis requirements and it is easily deployed on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and various operating systems.  As a COTS product, Vega Prime also removes the requirement for custom vendor support and life cycle costs.

The power of the Vega Prime software coupled along with the technical expertise offered by the TS group lead to MoD's decision to select Presagis for the OBVIOUS Program.

Presagis -- OBVIOUS Solution

In addition to the perspective and three dimensional views, the OBVIOUS viewers utilize Vega Prime features to present data in orthographic (map view) and simulated sensor views.  Entities and features in the scene can be viewed as in the real-world (rendered in 3D perspective) or shown as program-specific icons with state and other subsystem information (see below figures).

Figure 1

 

Figure 2

 

One unique feature of the OBVIOUS system is the ability to read from, and write to, a data repository in Esri using ARCGIS supported formats.  This capability allows multiple users to read, edit, and write data from a networked geographic information system repository.   This information is then redistributed as necessary so that all users have access to the most up to date data possible .

As shown in the next figure, building footprints from an Esri SDE Layer format are presented by the viewer in green, while other vector information in the scene for road systems is presented in magenta.  Editing of the attribute data in the OBVIOUS viewer is pushed back as a write into the Esri data repository.

Working with Presagis TS, the MoD has been able to successfully provide its users with a custom visualization system that meets their specific needs.  Based on the Vega Prime software engine, MoD and Presagis have been able to deliver a seamless application which excels on the goals of the OBVIOUS Program to improve database production efficiency, efficiently communicate visualization information across multiple organizations, and empower individual users to quickly orient, visualize, and modify key spatial information.

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