Augmented reality systems come with many benefits derived by CO-locating information with a user's environment through the use of one or more output modalities such as visual, auditory and tactile. In…

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded a $124,106.00 Firm Fixed Price contract to Maclean Engineering & Applied Technologies, LLC under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program Phase I. The contract is for the development of an Augmented Reality Adaptable Information Manager (AR-AIM) system, which will provide an infrastructure for integrating sensor inputs, task definitions, prioritization algorithms, and output modalities to enable adaptive augmented reality capabilities. The AR-AIM system is intended to support future deep space human spaceflight missions, where ground operations infrastructure may be less accessible, by providing autonomous crew activity monitoring and support tools. The contract was set aside for small businesses.

Augmented reality systems come with many benefits derived by CO-locating information with a user's environment through the use of one or more output modalities such as visual, auditory and tactile. In the case of future human spaceflight programs involving deep space missions, the ground operations infrastructure currently utilized for support of LEO missions will be less accessible or unavailable. This will place far higher emphasis on the importance of automated and intelligent tools for tasking, advising, and monitoring autonomous crew activity. Augmented reality systems will play a key role in achieving crew autonomy. With this fusion of real and virtual perception, however, comes challenges to ensure that the information is presented in a way that the user can effective consume IT meet the goals of the situation. The proposed innovation is a configurable and extensible augmented reality adaptable information manager (AR-aim) that provides an infrastructure for integration of disparate sensor inputs, task definitions, consideration factors, prioritization algorithms, and output modalities to achieve adaptive augmented reality. Specifically, IT will include a diverse combination of capabilities needed to make user interfaces that dynamically change to increase user precision and reduce stress on the user caused by the system. By being implemented as a reusable library, the AR-aim controller suite can be leveraged across many systems, use cases, and domains. Features will include: - FOV management - occlusion engine - optimal text placement - complexity scaling - multiple modality support - data interfaces - user contextual adaptations - stress predictor - multi-user integration