PORTRAYING AND UNDERSTANDING LARGE-SCALE DISTRIBUTED VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS - EXPERIENCE AND TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS

The Distributed Simulation Internet(DSI) provides users access to larg e-scale, complex, active, unpredictable virtual environments, if users are to effectively use these environments, they will require support for understanding and acting in these environments, Support is necessa ry because humans have a time and space limited span of attention. The Satellite Modeler, Omniview true 3D, and Synthetic BattleBridge proje cts were undertaken to develop and investigate the interfaces and auto nomous agents required to effectively support users of the Distributed Simulation Internet, The Satellite Modeler emulates the near-Earth sp ace environment and portrays models of satellites moving in their corr ect orbits around the Earth, The motion of the satellites is broadcast to users of the DSI, The Satellite Modeler is intended to function as a training and operational aid for orbital analysts and to help them understand key spatial relationships for satellites in near-Earth orbi t, The Omniview project was undertaken to provide interactive control and manipulation of a true 3D image and to thereby assist the user in understanding the activity within the DSI-hosted virtual environment, That project developed an interface that provides the Omniview user wi th the ease of use that a window, icon, mouse, and pointer GUI interfa ce provides to users of 2D displays, The Synthetic BattieBridge is a s ystem that, like the Omniview, portrays a DSI-hosted virtual environme nt but does not act in it, The Synthetic BattleBridge is designed to s upport users in making accurate and timely decisions by providing seve ral different types of cognitive support for understanding and analyzi ng the activity in a battlespace, In this paper, we briefly describe e ach project and present some observations and conclusions we have draw n based on our experience with them.