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The Immersion Advantage in Command & Control: from Desktop Monitors to VR Headsets

Advances in virtual reality technologies, including display and camera systems, have gone through a tremendous development in recent years. We can now use them efficiently in a significant number of applications. In remote exploration, monitoring and intervention tasks, immersive technology can lead to greater comprehension and accuracy of observation, making the decision process faster and more effective. However, the spread of immersive technologies has shown slow take-up, with VR adoption limited to few applications. This appears due to the often-needed change of operating paradigm and some skepticism towards the “VR advantage”. There is, therefore, a need to assess the benefits a VR system can bring to decision-making within commercial applications and the contribution immersion brings to user performance. This knowledge will help system designers understand when immersive technologies can be proposed to replace or complement standard display systems. A desktop monitor may, for example, be more suitable for visual overviews, whereas a VR headset can serve best on focused observations and actions. This paper proposes an evaluation of the advantage of using a VR headset compared to a standard desktop monitor for identification, discovery, and positioning tasks within command-and-control operations. Our assessment compares desktop monitors and VR headsets, and includes a VR desktop (i.e. a flat monitor-like view within a VR headset). Testing involves the use of remote drones within military defense actions. The aim is to gather insights into the role of immersive elements, e.g. isolation and 360 views. We aim at building new knowledge by evaluating findings and identifying advantages in complex scenarios. We rely on analyzing both objective measurements (time and accuracy), and subjective ratings related to human factors (sense of presence and depth perception).