Situational Awareness Data Extraction from Cooperative Virtual Reality Maritime Training Simulations

Situational awareness is a critical competence to master for maritime personnel to avoid critical failures risking safety in everyday practices. Cooperative simulator training utilizing virtual reality (VR) technologies provides new opportunities to train situational awareness, e.g., the capability to automatically collect data about cooperative behaviour. We explore different approaches to capturing behavioural data displaying participants’ situational awareness practices supporting trainers in teaching and assessing maritime trainees. We argue that to capture situational awareness behaviour we need to design data collection methods documenting 1) artefactual proximity; 2) body movement in the environment; and 3) mutual monitoring while interacting with artefacts. Through experimentation, we demonstrate ways to collect these types of situational awareness data and discuss limitations. Finally, we propose four design recommendations for extracting situational awareness data from behavioural data in cooperative virtual reality simulators.