Evaluation of Immersive Interfaces for Tactical Decision Support.

The benefits and limitations of immersive technologies in military decision-making are not well understood. Here, we describe the framework of an experiment which seeks to empirically determine the effects of immersive and non-immersive technology on decision-making. In this experiment, users are shown tactical spatial information about a building layout and told they must decide which of three pre-determined breach points is optimal for maximizing mission success and minimizing risk to the ground team. To ensure observable effects are related to immersion and not simply perception of depth, we deploy a between-subjects design with three viewing conditions: data shown in 2D on a desktop display, data shown in 3D on desktop display, and data shown in 3D in a head-mounted display (HMD). Dependent variables include decision accuracy, time to task completion, decision confidence, and score on the System Usability Scale. In the VR version of the experiment, full telemetry is captured to track when and for how long users interacted with specific information in the scenario environment. Pilot results suggest that tracking these metrics will allow for intricate comparison of decision-making behaviors between display types.