Abstract
Military camouflage evaluation is a critical domain that can benefit tremendously from recent methodological advancements in Human Factors. Specifically, the evolution of virtual reality (VR) technologies and their application to user testing and product development affords new opportunities for improving the range of conditions under which novel camouflage patterns may be evaluated and the degree of control and quantitative precision associated with such evaluations. The present paper reports an effort underway to apply VR techniques to the evaluation of camouflage uniforms for infantry forces. An experiment is described that compared target detection data from a standard photosimulation procedure with data gathered from a virtual analog of the same task. While differences were noted between the real and virtual stimuli the findings were encouraging and yielded insights into how VR might complement more traditional measures of camouflage effectiveness. These lessons are discussed and avenues for additional research are considered.
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