Situation Awareness in a Networked Virtual Submarine

Abstract

This paper concerns human factors that might impact the success of future maritime defense operations. In such operations, extensive networking is likely to allow large amounts of information to be shared between headquarters, ships, submarines and aircraft. Military planners anticipate that this will enhance situation awareness for their forces. Researchers at Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation are studying this issue using a synthetic environment (a game play simulation involving a manned virtual submarine operating within a computer generated scenario). The initial focus of this work has been to identify appropriate metrics with which to monitor performance. Here we present an attempt to employ objective situation awareness metrics. Despite some technical problems, a number of interesting findings suggest that there may be a trade off between the accuracy of operator understanding and the size of the field of view of networked sensors.