Floris van den Oever

Problem: For maritime safety, it is crucial to have high-quality collaboration between crew members and with crews onshore or on other units (e.g. other vessels, ports, and wind farms). A challenge to collaboration may be that each crew member has different perspectives and different information available (e.g. what they observe directly, observe through instrumentation, or draw from their memory or mental models). Augmented Reality may improve maritime collaboration. My Ph.D. project aims to identify how augmented reality can facilitate collaboration in marine operations.

Approach: One literature review and two empirical studies research how different augmented reality applications can support (shared) situation awareness, (collaborative) decision-making, and communication among crew members.

Methodology: The literature review is done according to the PRISMA statement. The first experiment uses Virtual Reality scenes simulating ship operations. Participants are on the bridge and carry out information-gathering tasks. Half the time they have Augmented Reality and half the time they don’t. I collect data on situation awareness, communication, usability, and risks and advantages. Experiment two will take form later, but will focus on collaborative decision-making. 

Contributions: Findings hopefully will inform the development and research of augmented reality applications for collaboration in safety-critical operations and facilitate improvement of the integration and usability of user interfaces.

Learn more about my work on LinkedIn, Research Gate, OSF, and Google Scholar.