A Methodology for the Assessment of 360 deg Local Area Awareness Displays

Abstract

In the process of developing new technologies for displaying 360 deg visual data supporting Local Area Awareness (LAA) in complex environments (e.g. tactical military environments), one important, though often overlooked, area is system evaluation. Without an accurate and reliable evaluation, it is impossible to determine which elements of the new display are useful and which need further development. Evaluating a system properly requires two types of tests: one for testing capabilities (e.g. given a display, what types of threats can be detected and identified?), and another for probing whether a given display configuration is useful (e.g. will the human operator use this more complex interface appropriately in the real world?). While established methodologies exist for the former, the latter often appears as a much less tractable problem. This is primarily because of the difficulties with modeling the complexity of the real world in a simulated environment. This paper presents a methodology for architecting a distributed simulation to support evaluation of a 360 deg LAA display system for usefulness to human participants within virtual environments. The evaluation that leveraged the methodology ultimately reported several unexpected results due to the effectiveness of the evaluation; for example, the experiment discovered a much greater "keyhole effect" than expected, where participants focused almost entirely on the forward 180 deg, even when presented with imagery covering the full 360 deg. Such results demonstrate the utility of the methodology, particularly for developing evaluations that discover unexpected aspects of operational use in complex environments.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 25, 2011
Accession Number
ADA542295

Entities

People

  • Brad Brumm
  • Chris Manteuffel
  • Jason Metcalfe
  • Matthew Jaswa
  • Tony Johnson
  • Xung Nham

Organizations

  • United States Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Algorithms
  • Armored Vehicles
  • Computational Science
  • Control Systems
  • Data Analysis
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Display Systems
  • Improvised Explosive Devices
  • Network Science
  • Reaction Time
  • Robotics
  • Simulations
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Unmanned Systems
  • Urban Areas

Readers

  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
  • Systems Analysis and Design