UNDERSEA COMMAND AND CONTROL VISUALIZATION Richard Shell and Lauren Mathews

This research investigates the creation and integration of a comprehensive three-dimensional submarine undersea battlespace visualization (SUBV) with existing platform fire control systems to enhance the weapons fire control decision-making process. Using 3-D visualization to represent undersea environments, mission planners and command and control (C&C) personnel can gain a tactical advantage by reducing the excessive cognitive demand currently placed upon the user through the exploitation of visualization and interaction methods. A discussion of the basic areas of research and results to date is presented. The focus of this paper is the methods used for bounding the complex regions in which targets can be found, methods for presenting received (passive) towed array data in a 3-D display, preliminary results from comparative testing of SUBV and current fleet capability, and a look at future efforts (i.e., transition to the fleet via the Future Naval Capabilities (FNC) program).