Page | 1 Human Interface Technologies Team: West Country - Based Projects [email protected] Contents Background 1 Virtual Scylla 2 Visualising Plymouth Sound 2 Submarine Training – SubSafe 4 HMS Courageous 4 The Maria 5 The A7 Submarine 5 The Amethyst 6 The GLAUCUS 6 Virtual Wembury 7 Wembury … The Dock That Never Was 7 Virtual Burrator 8 Burrator & Sheepstor Halt 8 Burrator: What Lies Beneath 9 RAF Harrowbeer, Yelverton 11 Drones Over Plymouth & Dartmoor 12 Longstone Manor 12 Foggintor & Haytor Quarries 13 Hooe Lake Wrecks 14 3D Scanning Projects 16 Medical Emergency Response Team Trainer 18 Pengelly Cave Studies Trust 18 The Virtual Mayflower 19 Mayflower Autonomous Ship 21 Mixed Reality Science Station 21 Background The Human Interface Technologies (HIT) Team has been undertaking high-tech research and development projects in Plymouth and surrounding coastal and moorland areas since 2003, when the Team was formed by its current director, Plymothian born-and-bred Professor Bob Stone. The choice of Devon for the Team’s R&D projects is not difficult to understand when reading the summaries provided below. The County has provided the HIT Team researchers with an abundance of opportunities to survey and recreate areas of natural beauty using a combination of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality (VR/AR) and drone-based technologies. Locations such as Wembury Bay and Burrator have become focal areas for the purposes both of delivering simulated virtual scenes of nature for hospital recovery and rehabilitation applications, and for projects in the domain of Virtual Heritage – using VR and AR techniques to turn back time or to make the historically invisible visible once again. Indeed, the maritime heritage evident throughout the County of Devon was responsible for “kick-starting” what, today, amounts to nearly 15 years of project work in the region, building on a foundation provided by two key, early projects, the virtual recreation of the ex-Leander Class Frigate, the Scylla, and the successful trials, with Her Majesty’s Naval Base at Devonport, of the first VR training system for nuclear submarines, SubSafe. © HIT Team 2020 Page | 2 Virtual Scylla Virtual Scylla was a project undertaken with the aim of showing how state-of-the-art developments in VR could deliver an environmental research and awareness tool accessible to a wide range of possible users, from marine biologists and engineers to schoolchildren and members of the general public. A 3D model of the Scylla was developed that could be explored in real time by piloting a virtual remotely operated (submersible) vehicle (ROV) using a Microsoft Xbox gamepad or other interactive controller. To add context to the experience, a geographically accurate model of the Whitsand Bay coastline, from Rame Head to Portwrinkle was also constructed using digital terrain map data and aerial photography. To endow the subsea wreck model with an educationally-relevant experience, members of the HIT Team also developed software techniques in artificial life (or alife) – the scientific study and simulation of the behaviour of biological organisms and systems – to investigate and predict how natural environments survive, reproduce, colonise and evolve and may be affected by environmental changes brought about by climate change, extreme weather events or pollution. Throughout the project, the Team collaborated with the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth (NMA) and the Marine Biological Association, and further technical support was provided by the Royal Navy’s Hydrographic, Meteorological and Oceanographic Training Group in Devonport. The Team visited the site of the actual Scylla Reef on numerous occasions using a VideoRay remotely operated submersible. In 2009, the Virtual Scylla alife and wreck “fly-through” demonstrators were presented to schoolchildren and specialist adult audiences at the NMA. Visualising Plymouth Sound This subsea visualisation project, although originally defence-oriented in nature, evolved from a civilian sector R&D study, in collaboration with the National Marine Aquarium (NMA) and the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth. This study, described earlier, addressed how artificial life techniques were able to simulate the marine colonisation of the virtual recreation of HMS Scylla. Whilst presenting the Virtual Scylla project at an NMA public event, a representation of FOST HM (Flag Officer Sea Training – Hydrography and Meteorology) expressed interest in developing the visualisation effort further, to address the visualisation of seabed topography and artefacts, using bathymetric data collected by the Royal Navy’s Hydrographic Fleet. This requirement evolved further into the development of a visualisation tool that could be used by future Mine Countermeasures Vessel personnel to help foster a strong spatial awareness of the “arrangement” of the seabed and various artefacts – targets, debris, wrecks, mines and the like – and to plan the deployment of appropriate countermeasures processes and assets, such as remotely operated or autonomous submersibles. A process was developed to support the rapid conversion of FOST’s bathymetric data into a format suitable for real-time exploration using an appropriate games or VR engine. To do this, high-resolution greyscale height map images derived from Fledermaus bathymetric survey datasets (in this case data from surveys in Plymouth Sound) were acquired, and the brightness levels maps were used to generate a topographical map in 3D, using an industry-standard modelling package. This map was then converted into a polygonal representation, suitable for import into the games engine. This enabled the development of an early concept human-system interface, comprising a multi-window interface format depicting close-proximity seabed topography and simulated views from port-, front-, starboard- and downward-pointing virtual cameras onboard a deployed probe, or ROV, (the views being controlled using an Xbox hand controller). The © HIT Team 2020 Page | 3 demonstrator was further developed to show how UK Hydrographic Office Assets (Maritime Foundation Data), in this case a navigational chart of Plymouth Sound, could be digitised and overlaid onto the converted bathymetric scan data. It was also possible to vary the transparency of this digital chart, thus allowing the end user to visualise the seabed and any virtual artefacts that had been modelled in 3D – underwater sensor networks, wrecks, sealife colonies, and so on. © HIT Team 2020 Page | 4 Submarine Training - SubSafe SubSafe was an experimental interactive VR spatial awareness training tool, designed to investigate the replacement of legacy training media in use by Royal Navy submarine qualification (SMQ) instructors. Navigating the decks and compartments in a “first-person” mouse-and-keyboard game style, SMQ trainees had access to all decks forward of the control room, comprising over 30 compartments and 500 different objects – including fire extinguishers, hose reels, high-pressure air valves, and emergency breathing system masks. A statistical analysis of knowledge transfer data, collated following over a year of experimental trials with the RN’s Submarine School at HM Naval Base Devonport, revealed that use of SubSafe during classroom training significantly improved the final “walkthrough” examination scores of trainees onboard an actual submarine. Interest in SubSafe has stimulated similar developments for the international submarine community, including virtual walkthroughs for the UK’s Astute Class, the Canadian Victoria Class and the Australian Collins Class. Digital SubSafe assets were also re-used to develop a 3D animation of the March 2007 HMS Tireless Self-Contained Oxygen Generator (SCOG) explosion incident for the Coroner’s Court of Inquiry. HMS Courageous Following on from research conducted in support of the SubSafe project described above, the HIT Team was given access to a restored Cold War nuclear submarine based at the Royal Navy’s Heritage Centre in Devonport, as part of a project to evaluate the use of digital media to provide visitor accessibility to an important naval heritage project. The boat in question, HMS Courageous, was a Churchill Class nuclear fleet submarine, launched in 1970 and commissioned with the Royal Navy from 1971. During her 21 years of service she was part of the Third Submarine Squadron, based at the Faslane Submarine Base in Scotland. As well as her role as a major North Atlantic surveillance asset during the Cold War, in 1982, to help retake the Falkland Islands from its Argentinean invaders, Courageous was despatched to support the British Task Force, including her sister ship, HMS Conqueror. In her current location, within Her Majesty’s Naval Base at Devonport, visitors are still required to descend vertical ladders and negotiate narrow bulkhead hatches to reach the internal compartments. This means that the submarine is not accessible to the elderly (including the submarine’s surviving veteran crewmembers) and disabled. The HIT Team has been working with the Museum to develop an interactive exhibit, merging both Virtual Reality representations of the submarine and more detailed 360o panoramic images. Whilst conducting a study for Flag Officer Submarines in 1999, it was concluded that a fully interactive 3D model of a submarine would require enormous manpower and computational resources, especially when one considers the massive amounts of detail evident from compartment to compartment and deck to deck. Instead, a solution