Main Subcommittee Category: Human Performance Analysis and Engineering

How would you label your submission?: Government

Abstract:

Sensors and displays provide situational awareness to Soldiers and allow operators to locate allies, enemies, civilians, and other objects of interest. A variety of technologies aim to help Soldiers find threats and other objects in their environment by providing Soldiers with visual cues. Although these cues can be displayed in different ways, they all attempt to orient the user’s gaze towards critical information. However, for these cues to be beneficial, they must be displayed with enough spatial accuracy to correctly draw the user’s attention to the intended object. This research explores the spatial accuracy requirements for cues to improve human performance relative to unaided search. Past research has demonstrated that as the range to the cued object increases, visual cues can provide greater benefits to human performance, but the negative effects of imprecision also increase. This research expands on previous work by examining an additional dimension of task difficulty: the density of objects in the scene that must be searched. In sparse scenes, an imprecise visual cue may still be sufficient to orient the user to the correct object. However, in scenes with many objects, spatially imprecise cues may result in insufficient guidance. In this experiment, Soldiers repeatedly searched simulated scenes for a person carrying a weapon while receiving a random type of assistance per scene. To characterize the effects of spatial imprecision, Soldiers searched some scenes with imperfect visual cues. The experiment investigated the effects of multiple levels of spatial imprecision (i.e., angular error between the cued threat and the displayed cue) at multiple ranges. To characterize baseline performance, Soldiers searched other scenes without assistance. To establish the maximum possible benefits, Soldiers searched additional scenes with perfect cues. Collectively, the data demonstrate the substantial benefits of visual search cues while simultaneously demonstrating the negative effects of spatial imprecision.

Keywords: AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL REALITY (AR/VR);COGNITIVE;HUMAN FACTORS

Additional Keywords not in the list above: Visual search, human performance, target detection

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William Sharp