An Asset Pipeline for Creating Immersive Experiences: From CAD Model to Game Engine
When an object is designed for manufacture and use, it is vital that various members of the design team, as well as the object’s end users, be able to fully comprehend the purpose and value of the designed object. Engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) call this “experiencing design intelligence.” When designing objects for use by people, following human-centered design practices will help the design team leverage the experience of those people to inform the object being created. Computer-aided design (CAD), in use for decades, has revolutionized the design and manufacturing processes for objects ranging from toys to buildings to spacecraft. CAD tools provide a wealth of information that is essential for many modern operations, and today CAD data can be combined with newer technologies to create immersive experiences that provide even more information and lead to even greater design intelligence for both design teams and end users. This article presents a nominal asset pipeline, including best practices, for taking a CAD model into a game engine to create an immersive experience.
Overview of Immersive Technology: Terminology, State of the Art, and APL Efforts
Immersive technologies have roots dating back to the 1800s. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has been exploring how to use these technologies to meet critical national needs for decades. Today these technologies constitute an entire domain, replete with its own lexicon, and commercially available tools have become more capable and less expensive. There are use cases for immersive technologies in just about every field, from the entertainment industry to health care to defense. This article reviews the history of immersive technologies, clarifies some of the terminology used to describe the technologies, and presents the current state of the art. It then presents 15 examples of APL work in a wide range of application areas including intelligence, military, first responders, medical, space, human factors, education, and research, and it concludes with some additional use cases.
Exploring Immersive Technology at APL: Guest Editor’s Introduction
Immersive technologies, including virtual and augmented reality, have been in use in a variety of application areas, such as gaming, teaming, training, health care, and engineering, for quite some time. In fact, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has been exploring these technologies for more than two decades. Today these technologies have coalesced into a vast and growing domain, often referred to as XR, with innovative applications and use cases in nearly every sector, from gaming and entertainment to real estate, retail, architecture, and education, to name just a few. This recent explosion in the XR ecosystem, including the introduction of more capable commercial products and improved software development tools, prompted APL staff members to explore new research and development efforts leveraging XR. This issue highlights several of these efforts.
APL Achievement Awards and Prizes: The Lab’s Top Inventions, Discoveries, and Technical Accomplishments in 2018
Every year, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) honors the accomplishments of its staff members with an awards program. When the program was created more than three decades ago, it recognized staff members’ exceptional contributions to the scientific community via publication, and these publication awards are still presented today. Much like the Lab has evolved, its awards program has grown to include prizes recognizing extraordinary achievements in research and development and sponsored programs and, most recently, efforts that exemplify APL’s focus on transformative innovations. Awards are presented during a formal ceremony on APL’s campus in Laurel, Maryland. This article details the awards presented for achievements in 2018.
Sensors and Communications Systems
Sensors and communications systems are key components of air and missile defense systems, enabling those systems to search to long ranges; detect and track aircraft, missiles, satellites, and artillery; discriminate and identify threatening objects; and pass that information on to combat systems and weapons that act on it to defeat threats. Our adversaries’ cruise and ballistic missile threat capabilities continue to evolve, making it challenging for our modern systems to perform these functions with sufficient accuracy and timeliness to maintain defense superiority.
Building the Combat Information Center of the Future
The Combat Information Center (CIC) is the tactical command center for most US Navy ships. Because of the CIC’s dense integration of sailors and complex systems necessary to fulfill the multiple simultaneous missions it supports, adherence to human systems engineering and integration principles is paramount to both its current and future designs. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is undertaking efforts to envision the art of the possible for CIC technology advancements through independent research and development emphasizing collaboration between warfighters and APL engineers. Through forecasting future warfighter needs, skills, and mental models; anticipating future technology trends; and creating flexible, rapidprototyping environments, APL hopes to bring the Navy CIC into the future and help keep our sailors and country safe.
Combat System Filter Engineering
To develop a new combat system, the designer has to determine the optimal filter type, filter application point, and dynamic model assumption. The definition of an optimal filter will change depending on the filter’s purpose and can change drastically depending on its application within the plan–detect–control–engage sequence. Ideally, the designer could apply a single computationally efficient filter algorithm that adapts in real time to threat maneuver, system bias, and measurement noise level while maintaining an accurate estimate with a high level of confidence. In practice, however, several different filters (often of different types) are applied to a single combat system in separate parts of the plan–detect–control–engage sequence to ensure the best results for problems that include track consistency, association, filter errors, and correlation. There are several key factors in developing a robust filter with the flexibility for the technology upgrades that are required to keep up with threat evolution. This article describes a design methodology to provide robustness in the face of dynamic threat behavior, lack of a priori knowledge, and threat evolution.
Integrated Air and Missile Defense Resource Management
Integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) resource management can apply to many different commodities within today’s modern militaries. This article addresses radar resources, which are radio-frequency energy and time segments used to detect, track, and discriminate targets with a phased-array radar. IAMD radar resources can be managed at both the discrete dwell level and at the macro task level. The first part of this article presents an IAMD radar scheduling algorithm that uses a variation on interval and “earliest-deadline-first” scheduling to efficiently achieve desired search frame times while satisfying fixed task deadlines. The latter portion of the article then discusses the design of a track coordination algorithm for long-duration ballistic missile defense tasks. Both concepts are applicable to multifunction phased-array radars and were designed to improve efficiency while meeting existing performance parameters.
Overview of Platforms and Combat Systems
Air and missile defense is a complex process involving the coordinated operation of equipment and computer programs. The most effective defense generally is multiple layers of defense using different technologies in each layer such as long-range hard-kill, followed by hard-kill area defense, followed by both hard-kill and soft-kill (electronic warfare) self-defense. A combat system must merge, fuse, and de-conflict many sources of sensor data to produce a single usable track picture for decision-making. Throughout, sensors are controlled and sensor resource use is managed to meet the overall defense needs. As technical direction agent and technical adviser for many of the combat system elements, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) performs the systems engineering, analysis, and experimentation that helps the Navy select the most combat system capability at an affordable cost.
Air and Missile Defense: Transformations for 21st-Century Warfighting
At the turn of the century, air and missile defense (AMD) warfighting challenges had become increasingly complex, requiring defensive systems to be more capable, resilient, robust, and able to fulfill multiple missions. In response to these challenges, the AMD community made significant advances in the use of multispectrum and multilayered engagement systems, as well as space systems, and cooperation with partners. The transformation of AMD capabilities during the early 21st century pushed the edges of technology integration, operational utility, and coordination of complex global systems of systems. At the forefront of these advances, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has provided game-changing thought leadership, capability innovations, and timely, pragmatic solutions. This article describes some of these transformative capabilities and is dedicated to the APL Air and Missile Defense Sector staff members who contributed to them.