Interfaces for Navigation and Familiarity Training

Search and rescue operations can greatly benefit from the training provided by familiarity with the situation area and from practice navigating the area. Often it is difficult, dangerous and expensive to train people in the actual environment in which they will be working. For example, training firefighters in a burning building is dangerous and very costly (a building is destroyed). Therefore, it would be advantageous to perform training in a less dangerous and less costly environment. We describe and compare four different interfaces for navigation and general familiarity training of an office environment, approximately 160 feet by 27 feet (the sixth floor of Packard Laboratory on Lehigh University’s campus, referred to as the "sixth floor" throughout this document.) These interfaces are Immersive Remote Reality (IRR) (see [Boult, et. al.]), Virtual Environment (VE), Enhanced Blueprint (EBP) and Traditional Blueprint (BP). We compare these interfaces against each other. The dangers in using the interfaces are minimal and the costs are relatively low. However, the most obvious disadvantage of the interfaces compared to the actual environment is that they model the environment with varying levels of realism. We give a description of an experiment we designed and performed to test familiarity and navigation skills. The subjects, who were required to be unfamiliar with the sixth floor environment, were assigned randomly to train using one of the four interfaces. Subjects were given a task in the real environment after training and their navigation time and wrong turns were recorded. Subjects also completed Witmer’s & Singer’s Presence Questionnaire [Witmer and Singer, 1998] for each training environment.