The use of simulators in maritime education and training is an essential component for developing seafarer competencies. Emerging immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) have created new and differing possibilities for maritime simulations and simulators. The increasing advancements and technical readiness of these systems have paved the way for a new generation and category of simulators and simulation-based experiences for professional education, training, and operations, which are relatively cheaper, more immersive, compact, and accessible in comparison to traditional configurations. Although the concept of utilizing VR, AR, and MR head-mounted display technologies for professional training and operations is not new, their recent developments and proliferation now allow for practical implementation and real-world application. Particularly, the adoption and integration of these technologies into the education, training, and operations of maritime industries provide new possibilities and paradigms to support operators and operations both on land and at sea. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concepts of VR, AR, and MR applications specifically for maritime education, training and operations, including the potential benefits, drawbacks, and limitations of these systems.

Over the past decade, virtual reality (VR) has re-emerged as a popular technology trend. This is mainly due to the recent investments from technology companies that are improving VR systems while increasing consumer access and interest. Amongst many applications of VR, one area that is particularly promising is for pedagogy. The immersive, experiential learning offered by VR provides new training and learning opportunities driven by the latest versions of affordable, highly immersive and easy to use head mounted display (HMD) systems. VR has been tested as a tool for training across diverse settings with varying levels of success in the past. However, there is a lack of recent review studies that investigates the effectiveness, advantages, limitations, and feasibility of using VR HMDs in training. This review aims to investigate the extent to which VR applications are useful in training, specifically for professional skill and safety training contexts. In this paper, we present the results from a systematic review of the effectiveness of VR-based simulation training from the past 30 years. As a secondary aim, the methodological trends of application and practical challenges of implementing VR in training curriculum were also assessed. The results suggest that there is generally high acceptance amongst trainees for VR-based training regardless of the technology limitations, usability challenges and cybersickness. There is evidence that VR is useful for training cognitive skills, such as spatial memory, learning and remembering procedures and psychomotor skills. VR is also found to be a good alternative where on the job training is either impossible or unsafe to implement. However, many training effectiveness studies reviewed lack experimental robustness due to limited study participants and questionable assessment methods. These results map out the current known strengths and weaknesses of VR HMDs and provide insight into required future research areas as the new era of VR HMD’s evolve.

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Accelerating technological advancement in the maritime industry is gradually increasing the range of functions once performed by humans to become automated. In the era of autonomous shipping, where the autonomous operating system takes the lead and data flows define decision-making, how the ship and its leaders can successfully navigate these new ways of working have important implications for safety, efficiency and reliability of future ship operations. It is critical that the non-technical skills requirements, in particular the leadership competencies, be re-evaluated as new operational paradigms of shipping systems emerge and evolve. This study extends the current research of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) by using a Delphi consensus survey and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with a panel of 36 experts to (1) bridge a knowledge gap, i.e., the lack of an understanding regarding the leadership implication of autonomous shipping; (2) evaluate the applicability of current STCW leadership requirements for MASS operations; (3) identify and prioritize the leadership competences that should be accrued by the personnel involved in future ship operations. The results have shown that the current STCW framework is not fully relevant for MASS. The redefined leadership competence and the constructed hierarchy of criticality generated from this study can be valuable input for revision of the STCW and maritime education and training practices, contributing to successful ship operations of the future.

Objective In this review, we investigate the relationship between agent transparency, Situation Awareness, mental workload, and operator performance for safety critical domains. Background The advancement of highly sophisticated automation across safety critical domains poses a challenge for effective human oversight. Automation transparency is a design principle that could support humans by making the automation’s inner workings observable (i.e., “seeing-into”). However, experimental support for this has not been systematically documented to date. Method Based on the PRISMA method, a broad and systematic search of the literature was performed focusing on identifying empirical research investigating the effect of transparency on central Human Factors variables. Results Our final sample consisted of 17 experimental studies that investigated transparency in a controlled setting. The studies typically employed three human-automation interaction types: responding to agent-generated proposals, supervisory control of agents, and monitoring only. There is an overall trend in the data pointing towards a beneficial effect of transparency. However, the data reveals variations in Situation Awareness, mental workload, and operator performance for specific tasks, agent-types, and level of integration of transparency information in primary task displays. Conclusion Our data suggests a promising effect of automation transparency on Situation Awareness and operator performance, without the cost of added mental workload, for instances where humans respond to agent-generated proposals and where humans have a supervisory role. Application Strategies to improve human performance when interacting with intelligent agents should focus on allowing humans to see into its information processing stages, considering the integration of information in existing Human Machine Interface solutions.