Human Performance in Virtual Environments

There are significant advances in virtual world technologies that permit collaboration in a distributed, virtual environment. In the real world environment, distributed teams collaborate via face-to-face communication, using social interactions, such as eye contact and gestures, which provide critical feedback to the human decision maker. The virtual world affords the system designer the ability to evaluate an operator's ability to respond to information (e.g., events, goals, objectives, etc.) in a complex, distributed team environment. The question is, how do we evaluate human performance and cognitive processes of decision makers within the virtual environment? We expect that virtual environments should facilitate sharing ideas, information and strategies among team members to achieve situation awareness and effective decisionmaking. This paper will discuss ways to evaluate performance in virtual environments and the critical role that immersive 3D environments will play in future ship designs.