As the frontiers and futures of work evolve, humans and machines will begin to share a more cooperative working space where collaboration occurs freely amongst the constituent members. To this end, it is then necessary to determine how information should flow amongst team members to allow for the efficient sharing and accurate interpretation of information between humans and machines. Shared situation awareness (SSA), the degree to which individuals can access and interpret information from sources other than themselves, is a useful framework from which to build design guidelines for the aforementioned information exchange. In this work, we present initial Augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) design principles for shared situation awareness that can help designers both (1) design efficacious interfaces based on these fundamental principles, and (2) evaluate the effectiveness of candidate interface designs based on measurement tools we created via a scoping literature review. This work achieves these goals with focused studies that 1) show the importance of SSA in augmented reality-supported tasks, 2) describe design guidelines and measurement tools necessary to support SSA, and 3) validate the guidelines and measurement tools with a targeted user study that employs an SSA-derived AR interface to confirm the guidelines distilled from the literature review. / Doctor of Philosophy / As the way in which humans work and play changes, people and machines will need to work together in shared spaces where team members rely on one another to complete goals. To make this interaction happen in ways that benefit both humans and machines, we will need to figure out the best way for information to flow between team members, including both humans and machines. Shared situation awareness (SSA) is a helpful concept that allows us to understand how people can get and understand information from sources other than themselves. In this research, we present some basic ideas for designing augmented reality (AR) tools that help people work together in better ways using SSA as a guiding framework. These ideas can help designers (1) create AR tools that work well based on these basic ideas and (2) test how well different interface designs work using specially developed tools we made. We completed user studies to (1) show how important SSA is when using AR to help with tasks, (2) explain the design ideas and tools needed to support SSA, and (3) test these ideas and tools with a study that uses an AR tool, based on SSA, to make sure the guidelines we got from reading other research are correct.

While the concept of situation awareness have received a lot of attention over the past 15 years and many different measures have been developed and tested, the concepts of team situation awareness and shared situation awareness have not gotten as much attention and less progress has been made in developing a meaningful and validated measure. Thus, the purpose of this study is to operationalize the concept of shared situation awareness and test its consequences and relation to other concepts. In this study a new measure for shared situation awareness was developed and its potential evaluated. The measure was a shared priorities measure where the participants of the study each wrote down and rank ordered five factors they thought were important for good team performance in the situation. The factors were then scrambled and handed over to the other participant who once again ordered them according to priority. The correspondence between the two participants’ ratings was hypothesized to correlate with shared situation awareness. The results show that the shared priorities measure in this study did not relate to shared situation awareness. Several methodological concerns was identified which could have affected the results. The measure did relate to subjective ratings of cooperation which is very interesting and it is suggested that the measure captured aspects of teamwork. The shared priorities measure was easy to employ, required little preparation, has a high face-validity and is a promising addition to team research. / Under de senaste 15 åren har konceptet situationsmedvetande uppmärksammats en hel del, och många mått har utvecklats och blivit testade. Däremot har inte konceptet delat situationsmedvetande kommit lika långt i form av metodutveckling och validering. Syftet med denna rapport är att operationalisera begreppet delat situationsmedvetande och pröva det mot andra koncept. Inom ramen för detta arbete utvecklades ett nytt mått för delat situationsmedvetande som också testades empiriskt. Måttet mäter hur väl ett team har delade prioriteringar. Varje deltagare genererar fem faktorer för vad som är viktigt för god teamprestation i situationen och rangordnar dem i prioritetsordning. Dessa faktorer blandades sen om och delas ut till den andre teammedlemmen som i sin tur rangordnar faktorerna i prioritetsordning. Hur väl faktorernas rangordning korresponderar med varandra antogs vara ett mått på teamets delade situationsmedvetande. Resultatet visar att rangordningsmåttet inte har något samband med subjektivt bedömt delat situationsmedvetande. Flera metodologiska problem identifierades som kan ha påverkat resultatet. Däremot korrelerade rangordningsmåttet med hur väl samarbetet i teamet ansågs fungera, vilket tyder på att måttet fångar aspekter av hur teamet fungerar som team. Rangordningsmåttet var enkelt att använda, krävde lite förberedelse, har hög face-validity och verkar vara en möjlig väg att fortsätta studera team.

Situation awareness (SA) describes how well a person perceives and understands their environment and the situation that they are in. When working in groups, shared SA describes how similarly the team members view and interpret the situation in a given environment. Immersive technology comprises technology that integrates virtual objects into the user’s reality of a physical world. It holds great potential for the application in educational contexts and collaborative settings like group projects. Immersive technology can increase engagement, make complex concepts more tangible, and increase media fluency. When immersive technology is introduced into a real-world setting, it creates a mixed reality with virtual and physical elements. In mixed reality collaborations, the complexity of elements in the environment can negatively affect the shared SA of the group members. The research problem of this thesis is that the intersection between shared SA and student group work that involves immersive technology is under-researched to this date. The research question is ”How is shared situation awareness in student group work formed when using immersive technology?”. A case study of a student group containing a participatory observation of several of their work sessions was carried out, and the obtained material was analyzed using sequential analysis. It was found that the students do not prioritize shared SA but work individually, dividing smaller subtasks among themselves and focusing on their own tasks first and foremost. Communication is used sparsely to stay updated about the other students’ work status, which helps to build shared SA. Communication also plays a crucial role in building shared SA when using immersive technology. It was also observed that the students prefer to use immersive technology in a way that allows more than one person to see the same virtual environment, as it is the case when two virtual reality (VR) headsets are connected to the same application.

Pour répondre aux enjeux de la longue vie opérationnelle des systèmes et de l’incertitude de l’environnement, la résilience complète la sûreté de fonctionnement pour prendre en compte les situations imprévisibles, sans précédent : l’objectif est de comprendre la situation pour éviter un accident. La qualité de l’interaction homme-machine est essentielle pour atteindre cet objectif. L’état de l’art présente la résilience des systèmes sociotechniques comme complémentaire à la sécurité. Mettre en œuvre la résilience affecte tant l’architecture système que les processus d’ingénierie système. Enfin, elle affecte aussi l’interaction homme-machine, tant son processus de conception centrée utilisateur, ses modèles utilisateur (persona), que ses modèles d’architecture. Nous avons créé le patron de conception « surveiller et alerter » appliqué à la fonction « éviter » de la résilience, pour donner aux opérateurs la capacité de comprendre la dynamique du système, le conduire à vue face à des situations imprévisibles, sans précédent afin d’éviter la survenue d’un accident. La proposition comprend aussi des processus à mettre en œuvre pour contribuer à la résilience d’un système critique à longue durée de vie. L’application au domaine ferroviaire s’appuie sur l’analyse de rapports d’enquête technique d’accidents. Elle se décline sur le patron de conception « surveiller et alerter » et sur le persona, in fine pour proposer des améliorations des interfaces utilisateur. Des perspectives de recherche complètent le mémoire. / The long operational lifecycle of systems and the uncertainty of the environment are a great challenge to engineers. Resilience enhances reliability and safety to take into account the unforeseeable situations, without precedent. The goal is to understand the situation to avoid an accident. The quality of the human-machine interaction is the key issue to achieve this goal. The state of the art explains that sociotechnical systems resilience completes safety approach. Implementaing resilience impacts both system architecture and systems engineering processes. At the end, implementing resilience impacts human-computer interaction, user centred design as well as architecture models. We created the design pattern “to monitor and alert” applied to the function “to avoid” of the resilience. Its goal is to give to the operators the capacity to understand the dynamics of the system, to control at sight vis-a-vis unforeseeable situations, in order to avoid an accident. The proposal contents the processes to be implemented to contribute to the resilience of long lifecycle critical systems. The application to the railway domain is based on the analysis of three accident technical reports. It is declined, on the processes to be implemented to contribute to the resilience of a system, on the design pattern “to monitor and alert” for the architecture of a resilient system and to propose improvements of the user interface. Research forecasts supplement the report.