Promoting Rapid Situation Awareness in Tactical Displays: The Role of 3-D Perspective Views and Realistic Symbols

3-D displays populated with realistic 3-D icons have been touted as making good “at a glance” displays. Do they promote more rapid Situation Awareness (SA) than comparable 2-D displays? If so, is it the display format (2-D vs. 3-D) or the nature of the symbols (realistic icons vs. non-realistic symbols) populating the displays that matters, or both? Three groups of 13 participants observed a 9 minute naval air defense scenario. The first group saw it depicted in 3-D with icons, the second group saw it depicted in 2-D with icons and the third group saw it in 2-D with symbols. In each condition, the scenario was stopped every 30 seconds and we assessed ability to recall the attributes of four random tracks with an online questionnaire. We measured Endlesy's (1995) level 1 SA: the perception of elements of the display. SA for the 3-D display increased fastest over the course of the scenario. However, it started from one third the level of that for the 2-D symbol display and it took 4 minutes to reach 2-D levels. The advantages the 3-D display did confer were for those attributes that were visually explicit in the 3-D icons but available only in pop-up text boxes in the 2-D conditions. Similarly, depicting heading explicitly with the 2-D icons was superior to that with the 2-D symbols. The benefits of 3-D displays may sometimes stem from indirect application of good design principles, such as making certain information visually explicit, rather than from depicting three-dimensional space, per se. It remains an open question whether 2-D displays can be designed with comparable explicit analog coding.