Supporting Situation Awareness in Collaborative Tabletop Systems with Automation

Abstract

Human operators collaborating to complete complex tasks, such as a team of emergency response operators, need to maintain a high level of situation awareness to appropriately and quickly respond to critical changes. Even though automation can help manage complex tasks and rapidly update information, it may create confusion that negatively impacts operators' situation awareness, and result in suboptimal decisions. To improve situation awareness in colocated environments on digital tabletop computers, we developed an interactive event timeline that enables exploration of historical system events, using a collaborative digital board game as a case study. We conducted a user study to examine two factors, placement of timelines for multiple users and location of awareness feedback, to understand their impact on situation awareness. The study revealed that interaction with the timeline was correlated with improved situation awareness, and that displaying feedback both on the game board and timeline was the most preferred.

Usage of Interactive Event Timelines in Collaborative Digital Tabletops Involving Automation

“…In this section, we first summarize the quantitative results from Phase 1 on the control placement and feedback location factors (details can be found in our previous publication [3]) to motivate our video analysis. Next, we present our video analysis results on timeline configurations and describe how timelines and other system features were used for the three levels of situation awareness.…”

“…The results from a detailed analysis of Phase 1, previously published in Chang et al [3], revealed that replicated timelines -where each player had their own copy in their personal space -encouraged more timeline interactions. More interactions with the timeline correlated with higher levels of individual situation awareness.…”

“…(M) The infection discard pile is shown at the centre of the map by default. For full details, see Chang et al [3]. at any time.…”

“…We developed the situation awareness questionnaire by following the steps outlined in the SAGAT methodology [9,12]. More details on the questionnaire can be found in Chang et al [3].…”

“…We analyzed the situation awareness questionnaires using a 2 (control placement) × 3 (feedback location) repeated measures analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA). See full details of the quantitative analysis in Chang et al [3].…”