The Tactical Decision Kit (TDK), developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR),
contains hardware and software components that allow users to rapidly
create ultra-realistic geospecific terrain models and visualize them as
holograms on the Microsoft HoloLens via an application called SandTable.
An early experiment in the development of the TDK involved the
incorporation of a radio-frequency (RF) propagation model called
Sandbar into the SandTable application. This enabled several
electromagnetic (EM) phenomena such as probability of detection and
received signal strength to be visualized on the SandTable's terrain
models in the form of color-coded semi-transparent overlays. Early
demonstrations of this capability have garnered a tremendous amount of
interest from multiple groups within the military, as it provides a
unique way to visualize RF phenomena which are normally invisible,
allowing insight into a unit's RF footprint as well as its ability to
intercommunicate.
During the development of the EM overlay capability within the SandTable,
various challenges were encountered associated with running computationally
intensive models on a non-tethered device with a relatively weak CPU. Novel
techniques were developed in order to overcome these challenges, including
shifting some of the computational burden from the CPU to the GPU, and
offloading other computations to a powerful remote PC. This paper details
the development of the spectrum operations capability within the SandTable
application, and explores the techniques that were employed to overcome
the aforementioned challenges.