Project Minard: A Platform for War-Rooming and Geospatial Analysis in Virtual Space

Abstract

The geographic movement of individuals and assets is a complicated maze of relational data, further complicated by the individuals’ relationships or allegiances to organizations and regions. Understanding this depth and complexity of information is difficult even on purpose-built systems using conventional compute architectures. A Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) project, called Minard, upgrades the war room to a virtual reality (VR) space. This system provides analysts with a collaborative and secure virtual environment in which they can interact with and study complex and noisy data such as alliances, the transit of individuals or groups through 3-D space, and the evolution of relationships through time. APL engineers designed intelligent visualization systems to bring the best of human intuition to state-of-the-art VR, with human–machine teams interacting both through the VR headset and behind a conventional computer terminal.