Immersion and Battlefield Visualization: Frame of Reference Effects on Navigation Tasks and Cognitive Tunneling

We compared two types of electronic displays of battlefield information in order to determine how display frame of reference affects a military commander's situation awareness and diagnostic capabilities in a dynamic combat scenario. US Military Academy officers viewed an unfolding ground battle scenario, presented as a sequence of computer-based slides, in one of two display view conditions. The first view condition was a 3-D exocentric (tethered) frame of reference (FOR) looking down at the terrain from 3000 meters above and 1200-1500 meters behind the commander's location, such that the commander's vehicle was always visible at approximately the same location on the screen (centered in the bottom third of the screen) for every scene. The second view condition was a combination display which consisted of an 3-D immersed egocentric view of the terrain from a viewpoint just above the command vehicle's location on the ground and a small 2-D contour map of the entire battle area embedded in the top center of the screen. Within each scene the officers were asked to verbally report any new enemy units or changes to existing units as well as to respond to a series of diagnostic questions about the particular scene and give confidence ratings of their selected answers. Results showed that the tethered display produced worse performance on distance judgment tasks than the immersed display. Performance was equivalent across display conditions on questions involving direction judgments. The immersed display condition produced worse global hazard awareness than the tethered display condition, however confidence ratings for the global awareness tasks did not differ between display conditions. Additionally, immersed display condition subjects take longer to respond to, and show poorer performance on, questions requiring them to pan the environment than subjects in the tethered condition (which did not have a panning option). However, confidence ratings did not differ between display conditions on these questions, indicating that subjects may not have been adequately panning the environment to acquire information outside of the initial forward field of view. These two findings indicate that immersed condition subjects were unaware that they were missing enemy targets in the periphery, most likely because they were tunneling into the initial forward field of view and neglecting to pan the environment for additional information. Soldiers in the Immersed condition were also less sensitive to changes in enemy activity from one screen to the next. Implications of these results are discussed, regarding the potential …