Umbra is highly suited to 3D dynamic visualization, which allows analysts to understand operational relevance and detect patterns in behavior displayed at rates faster, slower, or equal to real time. Because Umbra has Live-Virtual-Constructive capability, visualizations can be imported from recorded or live data feeds and may be merged back into live activity. Visualized metaphors within Umbra can be treated as objects and acted upon to further analysis. Visualizations composed within Umbra are easily available to all other Umbra applications.
As an example, analysis and visualization of dynamic physical-cyber operations have been difficult to achieve. As one solution, Sandia has used its flexible Umbra environment, which allows modeling and simulation of physical, cyber, and human cognitive elements into the OpInsight tool, a flexible dynamic interaction event visualizer. OpInsight can display network TCP/IP traffic occurring between vehicles in a mobile ad-hoc network. Hosts were represented by red orbs. Transmitted network packets were represented by yellow lines and blue lines for reception, each touching a TCP port plane suspended above the physical simulation. This display was detached and suspended above the physical simulation of vehicles, roads, and facilities. Through this visualization, it was evident that patterns identified node function. A simulation control commanded all orbs to descend to their respective vehicles. This binding showed which vehicle held the uplink function, while temporarily losing visualization of traffic volume and send-receive ratio available in the detached co-visualization. See the movie about this interaction, which also shows a conceptual denial of service (DOS) attack.
