Interface Issues in the Use of Virtual Environments for Dismounted Soldier Training

Download or read book Interface Issues in the Use of Virtual Environments for Dismounted Soldier Training written by Bruce W. Knerr and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1992 the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) initiated a program of in-house experimentation to investigate the use of virtual environments (YE) technology to train dismounted soldiers. Since that time, we have conducted thirteen experiments examining human performance in VE, training effectiveness and transfer of skills acquired in VE to the real world, and side-effects and after-effects of exposure to VE. The tasks used have included distance estimation, tracking, object manipulation, visual search, route learning in buildings, building search, and land navigation. This paper summarizes results from these experiments related to visual display characteristics and methods of locomotion. The most common YE display systems, low- to moderate-cost head mounted displays (HMDs), limit performance with low resolution and small fields of view (FOVs). Performance on a variety of distance estimation tasks is significantly worse than performance on similar tasks in the real world. Providing stereoscopic view improves performance, but only at short distances. Increasing the field of view while holding resolution constant improves performance. Linking the viewpoint to head movements improves distance estimates and, under some conditions, spatial knowledge acquisition. For some tasks, performance using a monitor is better than performance using an HMD, while on other tasks, the reverse is true. A variety of methods have been used to simulate walking in VE: joystick. spaceball, treadmills, and walking in place (with instrumentation to sense steps). Few direct comparisons of these methods have been made. For some tasks, a joystick combined with auditory cueing may provide an effective substitute for high-cost locomotion simulators.