Limits of Display Realism : Human Factors Issues in Visualizing the Common Operational Picture

The vision for the US military’s future common operational picture (COP) is to create a display that integrates data from all service arms to promote situation awareness (SA) and coordination. This tactical display must visualize the locations of a variety of blue forces and other assets overlaid and integrated with a variety of amplifying information (planning, weather, etc). Display designers are faced with the task of visualizing this complex situation in an intuitive and useful fashion that promotes SA. A popular approach is to maximize the realism of the display, on the assumption that realism will promote natural, intuitive, and easy human interaction. To this end, technological advances have enabled designers to create real-time, realistic 3-D perspective views of the tactical picture for “at a glance” SA. However, in a series of empirical studies conducted over the last five years for the US Navy, we have found that realistic 3-D views are only appropriate for specific tasks and generally do not enhance SA. Rather, they are misperceived and promote errors. This approach to display design of maximizing realism also assumes that realistic, real-time displays will provide adequate support for detecting significant changes to a situation. However, a wealth of psychological studies have documented the tremendous human susceptibility to miss changes in natural scenes. Why would designers create, and users prefer, displays that do not serve them well? Apparently, users harbour a Naïve Realism – a misplaced faith in their ability to extract information from natural scenes that translates into a desire for realistic displays. It is paradoxical and worrying that at a time when basic perceptual science is revealing just how flawed and sparse is our visual representation of natural scenes that display designers are striving towards photo-realistic naturalism. In this talk, we review this troubling trend and layout a set of human factors guidelines and display concepts for the COP that, though sometimes counter to Naïve Realism, are likely to promote superior performance.