Monitoring Maritime Industry 4.0 Systems through VR Environments

In this paper, we present a novel system aimed at replacing large-display information dashboards in industrial control rooms, with a flexible, dynamic and reconfigurable immersive virtual reality environment, which can afford high mobility without constraints, to remote engineers. In this context, we investigate the role of semantic and spatial cues for delivering event notifications within the control environment, and present empirical evidence from a controlled laboratory study, simulating a marine industrial environment. We find that spatial and semantic cues can both offer significant benefits to operator awareness and their combination can significantly improve the findability and response time to particular information in the extended information space surrounding the user.