Understanding the potential of virtual environments for improving C2 performance

Abstract

Effective Command and Control (C2) is enabled by information technology, but the potential of C2 through virtual environments offers opportunities for radical increases in awareness and performance. To realize such radical increases, we are engaged in a campaign of experimentation to assess C2 virtual environments through the ELICIT (Experimental Laboratory for Investigating Collaboration, Information-sharing, and Trust)multiplayer online counterterrorism intelligence game. Currtently ELICIT has only a primitive textual interface. This research seeks to investigate the impact of translting game-play into more immersive virtual environments, where participants interact as avatars and in modes that are reminiscent of physical experiences. Indeed, drawing from research in modeling and virtual environments, we hypothesize that a more immersive virtual environment offers potential to improve performance. Building on previous work in establishing design parameters for virtual environments, this research moves toward a more complete integration of ELICIT into the virtual space. This is accomplished by augmenting basic game-play functionality with more complex interactions in the virtual space and by investigating a fully automated agent-based experimentation utilizing ELICIT in virtual environments. The research described in this paper explores the impact of virtual environments on game-play and seeks to understand which aspects of C2 can be performed better through virtual environments that their physical counterparts.