The Effect of Object Selection and Operator Movement on Situation Awareness in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality provides an immersive visual environment that has been used in airborne surveillance tasks. The way in which operators interact with a virtual environment has been seen to influence their situation awareness and physical stress. The present work examines three aspects of interface design within a virtual space: object selection, operator movement, and search method. In two experiments, participants were immersed in a virtual environment and completed a search task and a recall task that mimicked operations seen in airborne surveillance to get measures of situation awareness and physical stress. Additionally, in the second experiment, measures of mental workload were incorporated through a peripheral detection task to examine available cognitive resources. Although all interface designs showed associated advantages and disadvantages, results from the experiments indicated that operator situation awareness and/or physical stress are benefited by a head-gaze selection method, a teleportation movement, and an origin-based search method.