Experimental evaluation of multimodal human computer interface for tactical audio applications

Mission critical and information overwhelming applications require careful design of the human computer interface. Typical applications include night vision or low visibility mission navigation, guidance through a hostile territory, and flight navigation and orientation. Additional channels of situation critical information can be better perceived using simultaneous audio and visual presentation. In this paper we present a multimodal simulation system as an open development environment for evaluation of sonification and visualization paradigms in augmented reality systems. The environment is implemented as a virtual audio-visual scene using the Java3D package, and used for performance measurements in tactical guidance applications. We present the results of a target tracking experiment with 10 participants using visual, acoustic and combined guidance. The experiment has shown that acoustic presentation significantly improve the quality of human-machine interaction and reduces errors during the guidance tasks.