Application of Virtual World Technologies to Undersea Warfare: The Impact of Virtual Environments on Human Performance

There are numerous advances in virtual world technologies that permit collaboration in an immersive 3D environment. In the real world environment, distributed teams collaborate via face to face communication, using social interaction and gestures, as well as a variety of tools to provide context and information to the human decision maker. Rapid information flow requires systems which will provide accurate and time-critical information among decision makers and further reduce cognitive workload and enhance situation awareness among team members. The virtual environment, such as Second Life, provides a unique approach to model varying configurations and evaluate operator performance. The operational level of the decision maker is key to their ability to respond to dynamic situational context information (e.g. events, goals, objectives, etc.) in a complex distributed team environment.

One of the key questions which arise within virtual teams is, how do we evaluate human performance in terms of levels of expertise, strategies and cognitive processes of decision makers within the context of specific scenarios conducted in both environments. We expect that virtual environment should provide a rich forum for sharing ideas, information and strategies and help to forge an integrated, collaborative team to achieve situation awareness and effective decision making. To this end, virtual world technologies provide a means to develop environments which foster collaboration among team members, support training and ensure effective decision making. This paper will discuss ways to evaluate performance in Second Life synthetic environments and achieve an understanding of their impact on human performance. This paper also highlights the critical role that immersive 3D environments will play in future ship designs, as well as in command and control training and operational performance

Speaker's Bio

Dr. Yvonne Masakowski has a distinguished career in research and development of over 20 years professional experience in human factors, system design, test and evaluation for the United States Department of the Navy (DoN). She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology, a Master’s Degree in Philosophy, a second Master’s Degree in Psychology (Psycholinguistics), a Bachelor’s Degree in Experimental Psychology and a Diploma from MIT for foreign policy and national security.

She has served as the Associate Director for Human Factors for the Office of Naval Research Global, London, UK and as the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Science Advisor to the Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College. Dr.Yvonne Masakowski currently serves as the Lead for the Human Performance Technology Group at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC). She is responsible for the development and design of decision support systems within US Navy submarine and surface ship platforms. She serves on several international panels including the NATO Human Factors & Medicine’s Multinational Operations Panel, and as a member of two International Technical groups: The Technical Cooperation Program: Maritime Systems Panel (TTCP MAR TP1) and The Technical Cooperation Program: Human Factors Integration for Naval Systems, Technical Panel 9 (TTCP HUM TP9). She has released a book, titled,“Decision Making in Complex Systems”.

Authors' Info:
Dr. Yvonne R. Masakowski and Mr. Steven Aguiar
Human Performance Technology Group
Lead Human Factors Psychologist
Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC)
Emergent & Transformational Systems Division
Newport, RI, USA