Development of Shared Situation Awareness Guidelines and Metrics as Developmental and Analytical Tools for Augmented and Virtual Reality User Interface Design in Human-Machine Teams

As the frontiers and futures of work evolve, humans and machines will begin to share a more cooperative working space where collaboration occurs freely amongst the constituent members. To this end, it is then necessary to determine how information should flow amongst team members to allow for the efficient sharing and accurate interpretation of information between humans and machines. Shared situation awareness (SSA), the degree to which individuals can access and interpret information from sources other than themselves, is a useful framework from which to build design guidelines for the aforementioned information exchange. In this work, we present initial Augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) design principles for shared situation awareness that can help designers both (1) design efficacious interfaces based on these fundamental principles, and (2) evaluate the effectiveness of candidate interface designs based on measurement tools we created via a scoping literature review. This work achieves these goals with focused studies that 1) show the importance of SSA in augmented reality-supported tasks, 2) describe design guidelines and measurement tools necessary to support SSA, and 3) validate the guidelines and measurement tools with a targeted user study that employs an SSA-derived AR interface to confirm the guidelines distilled from the literature review.