Search for: All records

Emerging technologies offer the potential to expand the domain of the future workforce to extreme environments, such as outer space and alien terrains. To understand how humans navigate in such environments that lack familiar spatial cues this study examined spatial perception in three types of environments. The environments were simulated using virtual reality. We examined participants’ ability to estimate the size and distance of stimuli under conditions of minimal, moderate, or maximum visual cues, corresponding to an environment simulating outer space, an alien terrain, or a typical cityscape, respectively. The findings show underestimation of distance in both the maximum and the minimum visual cue environment but a tendency for overestimation of distance in the moderate environment. We further observed that depth estimation was substantially better in the minimum environment than in the other two environments. However, estimation of height was more accurate in the environment with maximum cues (cityscape) than the environment with minimum cues (outer space). More generally, our results suggest that familiar visual cues facilitated better estimation of size and distance than unfamiliar cues. In fact, the presence of unfamiliar, and perhaps misleading visual cues (characterizing the alien terrain environment), was more disruptive than an environment with a total absence of visual cues for distance and size perception. The findings have implications for training workers to better adapt to extreme environments. 

Electrocution is one of the major causes of fatalities in the construction industry. Despite periodic safety training aimed at retaining workers’ vigilance (i.e., sustained attention) to electrical hazards, workers tend to fail to maintain vigilance toward frequent encounters with electrical hazards. Providing an effective intervention that restores workers’ vigilance is thus critical to reducing electrocution accidents. To this end, this study proposes a Virtual Reality (VR) safety training environment that exposes workers to repeated electrical hazards and simulates an electrocution accident when workers come in contact with the hazards. A pilot experiment was conducted, and participants’ vigilance (i.e., eye fixations on the hazard) was measured using eye-tracking sensors. The results reveal the potential effect of experiencing VR-simulated electrocution on enhancing workers’ vigilance to electrical hazards. The outcomes of this study will lay the foundation for further studies to employ VR as a safety training environment that allows workers to experience a simulated electrocution, thereby contributing to a potential reduction in fatal electrocutions. 

The purpose of this study is to understand how spatial ability differs under extreme environments and to provide implications on individually relevant training approaches by using VR technologies. Special jobs under extreme conditions (e.g., astronaut or scuba diver) demand higher spatial ability and effective spatial strategy. This paper examines how the conflicts between visual vertical and the body vertical may affect spatial ability. In addition, the study tested the relationship between an individual’s tendency to adopt a certain spatial strategy (egocentric vs. allocentric) and their use of a particular spatial reference frame (body vs. visual) under the extreme condition.