ICONE19-44053 The effects of Virtual Reality Displays on Visual attention and Detection of signals Performance for Main Control Room Training

Abstract

The nuclear power plant (NPP) mainly serve the purpose to provide low-cost and stable electricity for the people, but this purpose must be dependent upon the premise of "safety first." The reason for this is that the occurrence of nuclear power plant accidents could cause catastrophic damage to the people, property, society, and the environment. Therefore, training in superior and high reliability system is very important in accident prevention. In recent years, the Virtual Reality (VR) technology advances very fast as well as the technology for e-learning environment. VR systems have been applied for education, safety training of NPP and flying simulators. In particular, VR is an interactive and reactive technology; it allows users to interact and navigate with objects in the virtual environment. Development of VR and simulation techniques contributes to an accurate and immersive training environment for NPP operators. Main Control Room (MCR) training simulator based on VR is a more cost effective and efficient alternative to traditional simulator based training methods. The VR simulation for MCR training is a complex task. Since VR not only reinforces the visual presentation of the training materials but also provides ways to interact with the training system, it becomes more flexible and possibly more powerful in the training system. In the VR training system, the MCR operators may use just one display to view the wide range of the real world displays. The field of view (FOV) will be different from the real MCR environment in which many displays exist for the operators to view. Thus operator's immersion and visual attention will be reduced. This is the problem of MCR virtual training compared with the traditional simulator based training systems. Therefore, improving the operator's visual attention and the detection of signals in VR training system is a very important issue. This investigation intends to contribute in assessing benefits of visual attention and the detection of signals for VR simulation in MCR training. This study compares the VR representation methods (Desktop VR and Projector VR) performance on visual attention and detection of signals. We develop a questionnaire for the evaluation of the immersion effect of the virtual display of MCR. The results indicated that different VR representation methods significantly affected the participants' visual attention and detection of signals.