Touchless Interaction for Command and Control in Military Operations

The military strategy to obtain information superiority is enshrined in the concept of Network Centric Warfare: a modern doctrine based on the interconnection of knowledgeable entities. By increasing the number of commanded platforms, the volume of the data that can be accessed grows exponentially with a high risk to get a state of information overload. This paper proposes an augmented environment for efficient command and control in net-centric operations. Touchless interaction by means of Leap Motion has been explored in order to provide a faster and more natural way to issue commands and increase situational awareness. The proposed approach was evaluated by twelve users who performed different tasks on Loki, a command and control system for electronic warfare developed by Elettronica S.p.A. The results show a strong improvement in users' performance (i.e., completion time, number of failures, failure rate) and experience (i.e., control simplicity, level of immersion and situational awareness).