Enhanced OV-1 Improvements

By Jason Krueger

ENHANCED OV-1 DEVELOPMENT

The Department of Defense (DoD) Architecture products are consistently increasing in operational complexity and can sometimes become an assortment of hard-to-understand clip art graphics crowded by technical text. Due to the amount of information and the complexity of these legacy architecture assets, they can be an overload of information for many that view them.

As the Army continues to modernize its capabilities, there is a crucial need for better ways of quickly communicating complex future force operations and future capability integrations across the Army's Cross Functional Teams (CFTs), Centers of Excellence (CoEs), Capability Development Integration Directorates (CDIDs), and with other military branches and allied partners.

THE JANUS APPROACH

JANUS has been listening to the challenges that many Architects have had in developing effective Operational Views (OV-1s) over the past years and has worked with the community to find ways to turn numerous complex technical documents into easy-to-understand, visually appealing single-page concepts. Through testing and experimenting with the Architects' design processes, JANUS has developed an enhanced OV-1 approach that is focused on reducing the amount of text within the concept, and instead, focusing on emphasizing the visual storytelling composition and graphical elements. This approach, along with adding enhanced 3D models, visual effects, and lighting elements has made the content easier to understand and more compelling.

After successfully completing several enhanced OV-1 concepts for different organizations in the Army, JANUS was asked to transform a static OV-1 into a narrated cinematic OV-1 with 2D/3D animations, video, motion graphics and effects. The first cinematic that JANUS did was for Maneuver Support CDID and it consisted of synthesizing hundreds of pages of dense technical documentation and reducing them to a quick three-minute engaging cinematic. This new animated OV-1 video format helped the targeted audience to easily understand and enjoy the complex doctrine and capabilities in a shorter amount of time.

THE RESULT

JANUS has since gone on to make several animated and enhanced static 3D OV-1s, for numerous organizations, that have been used to brief military leadership, DoD contractors, military conferences, U.S. politicians and allied partners from around the world.

The cinematic and enhanced OV-1 model puts operational situations, capabilities and/or scenarios more easily into context, providing an effective tool for organizations to get a quick conceptual understanding, while making the content more engaging and easier to consume for military and non-military personnel alike.