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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
Volume 6 - 2025 |
doi: 10.3389/frvir.2025.1487281
Impacts of 3D visualizations and virtual reality in display designs for remote monitoring of satellite operations
Provisionally accepted- University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States
Remote supervision and monitoring of autonomous systems is an important modality for future operations including spaceflight, manufacturing, and transportation. However, monitoring presents many challenges for the operator, which may be reduced through novel interfaces and display design. Virtual reality (VR) shows promise for direct control teleoperation paradigms, but it is unclear if VR is useful for future supervisory paradigms that will primarily involve monitoring systems rather than directly controlling them. This paper investigates the impacts of 3D visualizations and VR in displays for the remote monitoring of a satellite servicing mission. Three different displays, with different degrees of 3D visualizations and immersion, are compared through human subject testing (n = 33) on factors of situation awareness, workload, usability, and subjective utility. These displays include an immersive, visualization-based VR display, a non-immersive screen-based 3D visualization, and a non-immersive, non-visualized baseline display. Visualizations improve level 2 (comprehension, p = 0.009) and level 3 (projection, p = 0.014) situation awareness, and VR reduces level 1 situation awareness (perception, p < 0.005). No differences are found among workload, usability, and utility; however, the results of subjective utility are trending towards significance (p = 0.069). This research indicates there are benefits to including visualizations for display design for remote monitoring of satellites, but these initial results find little evidence that VR provides additional benefits.
Keywords: virtual reality, Display modalities, Situation Awareness, human factors, Supervisory control
Received: 27 Aug 2024; Accepted: 27 Jan 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Buchner, wood, Rindfuss, Schaub and Anderson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Savannah Lynn Buchner, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States
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