MEASURING SITUATION AWARENESS IN MIXED REALITY SIMULATIONS

Abstract: Off-highway vehicle, such as excavators and forklifts, are heavy machines that are capable of causing harm to humans or damage property. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to develop interfaces for these kind of vehicles that can aid the operator to maintain a high level of situational awareness. How the interface affects the operators’ situational awareness is consequently an important metric to measure when evaluating the interface. Mixed reality simulators can be used to both develop and evaluate such interfaces in an immersive and safe environment. In this thesis we investigated how to measure situational awareness in a mixed-reality off-highway vehicle simulation scenario, without having to pause the scenario, by cross-referencing logs from the virtual environment and logs from the users' gaze position. Our method for investigating this research question was to perform a literature study and a user test. Each participant in the user test filled out a SART post-simulation questionnaire which we then compared with our measurement system.