Meeting mission objectives while ensuring Warfighter safety is a difficult balance to strike. One way to meet this balance is by leveraging new technologies which can deliver the necessary data to make quick, life saving decisions. Today, mobile handheld devices, including smart phones, are abundant in our society and offer many features that can aid the Warfighter including GPS location, integrated maps, and augmented reality. However, for more advanced applications these devices need to be coupled with highly accurate terrain models which support services such as designating areas blocked by line of sight or accurately reporting changes in the environment.
Until recently, full terrain services were either too computationally/resource expensive to operate on handheld devices or operated on data too coarse to provide significant benefit to the frontline soldier. The Army's STTC has invested in the Layered Terrain Format (LTF), which is specifically designed to be a terrain simulation engine providing high fidelity terrain representation and services for devices with limited resources. LTF provides the necessary foundation to build and deploy situational awareness applications on mobile commercial hardware.
To prove our concept of providing detailed situational awareness on mobile platforms we selected both the iPhone and Android devices based on their price, capabilities, availability, and overall popularity. We leveraged, and further developed the LTF baseline to meet the needs of a mobile, high resolution situational awareness device.
In this paper we discuss the overall applicability of portable devices to the Warfighter, describe our solution to the problem, discuss the interesting quirks in developing for different mobile platforms, and describe the future capabilities that can be achieved with mobile devices supporting Situational Awareness, planning, and communications.