From 26-27 May the Logistics Department of the Italian General Army Staff hosted the fourth annual conference for Software Engineering for Defence Applications (SEDA). The Conference provided the venue for governmental organizations, industry and academia to discuss new ways of delivering software capabilities within defence domain. In particular, an exhaustive radiography was provided on the use of Agile Software engineering methods in the development or procurement of defence capabilities.
The Agency's Mr Pascal van Paridon presented a paper prepared by the NCI Agency at this conference. The paper highlighted NCI Agency's experience with the Agile Software development method in a case of an Augmented Reality project executed for — and in cooperation with — the Italian Ministry of Defence. Moreover, an operational demonstration of Augmented Reality applications developed by the NCI Agency was included in the conference programme. This was part of a wider demonstration of Command and Control software developed by the Logistics Department of the Italian Army, known as LC2EVO.
This was the first time augmented reality applications developed by NCI Agency were tested by the user community in an operationally relevant context. This involved an advance military search team from the Italian 6th Mechanized Regiment conducting a training mission in an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) contaminated environment. The team used 'smart' glasses and augmented reality applications developed by the NCI Agency to receive critical information about IED host locations from NATO information systems, such as JOCWatch. Live streaming of video data over 3G and 4G mobile communication channels from the search team during the mission was also demonstrated. In addition, Biometric identification and matching against a biometric enabled watch list was also exercised during the demonstration.
The NCI Agency team supporting this event was composed of Franco Fiore, Pascal van Paridon and Cristian Coman from the Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Service Line.