Towards an Extensible Virtual GEOINT Center

As the number of devices collecting and sending data in the world are increasing, finding ways to visualize and understand that data is becoming a challenge. This has often been coined as the problem of “Big Data.” The Virtual Geoint Center (VGC) being developed by research collaborators at TecˆEdge facility aims to aid in solving that challenge by providing a way to combine the use of the virtual world with external tools thru a novel and extensible sensor cloud architecture, that was developed to solve a multi modal sensor fusion challenges. Using open-source software such as OpenSim and Blender, the VGC uses a visually stunning 3D environment to display the data sent to it, thru development of optimized visualization techniques. The VGC is broken up into two major components: The Kinect Minimap, and the Geoint Map. The Kinect Minimap uses the Microsoft Kinect and its open-source software to create a 3D representation of the personnel in its field of view. The Geoint Map collects smartphone sensor information in real time from a pervasive network and displays it on user-friendly and navigable map view. By combining external tools and the virtual world, the VGC can help a user “visualize” data, and provide additional tools to “understand” the data. This paper provides the details of the various components of the VGC and also discusses the implications of the present work and insights for the future work.