nuSketch battlespace

Abstract
Sketching provides a natural means of interaction for many spatially-oriented tasks. One task where sketching is used extensively is when military planners are formulating battle plans, called Courses of Action (COAs). This paper describes a system we have built, nuSketch Battlespace (nSB), which provides a sketching interface for creating COAs. The system is described in the paper "Sketching for Military Courses of Action" in these proceedings. The demonstration will highlight:How we engineer around the need for recognition in sketching systems (a key feature of the nuSketch approach to multimodal interfaces), so that we can focus instead on understanding.The use of comic graphs to manipulate multiple states and the relationships between them, for developing and visualizing complex plansThe spatial reasoning carried out by nuSketch Battlespace, including the use of qualitative topology and Voronoi diagrams in computing spatial relationships, and our methods for path-finding and position-findingThe use of analogy to generate enemy intent hypotheses based on previously drawn sketches