nuSketch battlespace: a demonstration

ABSTRACT

Sketching provides a natural means of interaction for many spatially-oriented tasks. One task where sketching is used extensively is when military planners are formulating battle plans, called Courses of Action (COAs). This paper describes a system we have built, nuSketch Battlespace (nSB), which provides a sketching interface for creating COAs. The system is described in the paper "Sketching for Military Courses of Action" in these proceedings. The demonstration will highlight:

• How we engineer around the need for recognition in sketching systems (a key feature of the nuSketch approach to multimodal interfaces), so that we can focus instead on understanding.
• The use of comic graphs to manipulate multiple states and the relationships between them, for developing and visualizing complex plans
• The spatial reasoning carried out by nuSketch Battlespace, including the use of qualitative topology and Voronoi diagrams in computing spatial relationships, and our methods for path-finding and position-finding
• The use of analogy to generate enemy intent hypotheses based on previously drawn sketches