ACCELERATING THE DELIVERY OF TECHNOLOGY TO THE WARFIGHTER USING COLLABORATIVE IMMERSIVE XR TECHNOLOGY ENVIRONMENTS & TOOLS

As technology continues to improve at a rapid pace, many organizations are attempting to define their place within this modern age and the Department of Defense (DoD) is no exception. The DoD’s primary focus on modernization ensures that its design, development, and sustainment of systems demonstrate unparalleled strength that outpaces our adversaries and continue to solidify our position quickly and efficiently as the world’s mightiest through fundamental change.

Digital Engineering (DE) is the foundation of that fundamental change. Speed-to-Warfighter, reliability, maintainability, resiliency, and performance are all improved through DE techniques. Accelerating technical integration by connecting once isolated data to a digital thread encompassing all domains, and further facilitating the evolution of the traditional approach/processes into an effective DE strategy. DE’s goal supports a reduction of inefficient process/procedures/communications that traditionally can yield slow iteration, inconsistent resource management, limited participation, and more while promoting mitigating efficiencies.

This document explores a DE approach that allows for stakeholder/user collaboration daily using a model centric environment connected through the digital thread and supports the DoD’s 2018 DE strategy implementation. It provides easy and efficient information sharing with one input informing and directly impacting the inputs/outputs of the connected model; creating one authoritative source of truth. Demonstrations and support can readily be provided using existing tools and enabling the ability to complete iterations in minutes or hours instead of weeks or months. It also supports early collaboration, evaluations, and reviews using immersive and XR (augmented/virtual/mixed reality) technologies utilizing both concepts of augmented reality to virtual reality to improve overall efficiency and decision making throughout the product lifecycle. Additionally, the utilization of XR provides many other benefits that allow for a variety of more in-depth applications involving human in the loop practices promoting efficiency, consistency, validation, verification, and facilitates performance and knowledge boost of processes, procedures, and end-user applications. Through the use of XR immersive technologies the technological landscape is quickly shifting and evolving in how data is consumed in many areas including industry, government, commercial, and academics. This document demonstrates actual proofs of concept of this evolutionary change in conjunction with DE practices to demonstrate military adoption and processes that support collaboration, evaluation, and opportunities for quicker project completion or stage progression with XR.

Citation: A. D., Granville, “Accelerating the Delivery of Technology to the Warfighter Using Collaborative Immersive XR Technology Environments & Tools,” In Proceedings of the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium (GVSETS), NDIA, Novi, MI, Aug. 15-17, 2023.