NREC developed a real-time 3D video system to improve situation awareness in teleoperation and indirect driving.

SACR (Soldier Awareness through Colorized Ranging) fuses video images and ladar in real time to create highly realistic 3D video. Drivers can zoom and pan this wide angle 3D view of the vehicle’s environment. They can shift the virtual camera’s viewpoint to different points around the vehicle – including a synthetic overhead view – to better see its surroundings. Drivers inside vehicles can “see” through the hull. Remote drivers can have a perpetual synthetic line of sight, as if following behind the teleoperated vehicle on foot or in an aircraft. Maps and autonomy plots can be overlaid on the image.

These improvements give drivers a better view of a vehicle’s surroundings, improving their awareness of its environment and making remote and indirect driving safer, easier, and faster. Other potential SACR applications include mapping, mission visualization, mission rehearsal, and localization of personnel and vehicles.

In field trials, operators performed 20% to 50% better on a range of driving tasks with SACR than they did with existing 2D video systems.