Usability Engineering: Domain Analysis Activities for Augmented Reality Systems

This paper discusses our usability engineering process for the Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS). Usability engineering is a structured, iterative, stepwise development process. Like the related disciplines of software and systems engineering, usability engineering is a combination of management principals and techniques, formal and semiformal evaluation techniques, and computerized tools. BARS is an outdoor augmented reality system that displays heads-up battlefield intelligence information to a dismounted warrior. The paper discusses our general usability engineering process. We originally developed the process in the context of virtual reality applications, but in this work we are adapting the procedures to an augmented reality system. The focus of this paper is our work is on domain analysis, the first activity of the usability engineering process. We describe our plans for and our progress to date on our domain analysis for BARS. We give results in terms of a specific urban battlefield use case we have designed.