This paper reviews several significant human factors issues that could stand in the way of virtual reality realizing its full potential. These issues involve maximizing human performance efficiency in virtual environments, minimizing health and safety issues, and circumventing potential social issues through proactive assessment.

The performance of direct workers has a significant impact on the competitiveness of many manufacturing systems. Unfortunately, systems designers are ill-equipped to assess this impact during the design process. An opportunity exists to assist designers by expanding the capabilities of popular simulation modelling tools, and using them as a vehicle to better consider human factors during the pr...

This paper investigates facial communicative signals (head gestures, eye gaze, and facial expressions) as nonverbal feedback in human-robot interaction. Motivated by a discussion of the literature, we suggest scenario-specific investigations due to the complex nature of these signals and present an object-teaching scenario where subjects teach the names of objects to a robot, which shall term t...

We describe a GOMS model of a ship-board Radar Operator’s behavior while monitoring air and sea traffic. GOMS is a technique that has been successfully used in Human-Computer Interaction to generate ngineering models of human performance. Based on the GOMS model developed, we identified those portions of the task where an intelligent agent would be most able to assist operators in the performan...

In this paper we propose a discount analytical approach for quantitatively evaluating shared workspace usability. We started with existing models of human performance, developed in the Human-Computer Interaction field and thus focused on single user interactions, and studied the benefits of extending them to collaborative scenarios. The obtained results indicate that the proposed approach: (1) ...

This paper presents a discussion of the susceptibility of human factors to the use of folk models. The case of automation-induced complacency is used as a guiding example to illustrate how folk models (1) substitute one label for another rather than decomposing a large construct into more measurable specifics; (2) are immune to falsification and so resist the most important scientific quality c...

Tool support is described for analyzing requirements and creating conceptual models from scenarios. A schema of scenario-based knowledge is proposed that extends the i* ontology with concepts to represent the system environment and natural language semantics to categorize arguments. Modelling tools are introduced to support the process of transforming scenarios into models and requirements. We ...

We propose a new segmentation evaluation metric, called segmentation similarity (S), that quantifies the similarity between two segmentations as the proportion of boundaries that are not transformed when comparing them using edit distance, essentially using edit distance as a penalty function and scaling penalties by segmentation size. We propose several adapted inter-annotator agreement coeffi...