Comparative effectiveness of computer assisted instruction using a head-up display for operation of the transportable earth station

Abstract

Using a head-up display (HUD) for computer-assisted instruction (CAI) creates a new form of support for manipulating complicated devices. A head-mounted display (HMD) enables head-up interaction to be realized by overlaying virtual objects onto the real scene. We attempted to apply HUD-based CAI to a support system for the operation of a transportable earth station consisting of an automobile van containing various pieces of equipment for satellite communications. The HUD-based CAI system provides information on how to manage the pieces of equipment, which are identified with markers, as the user looks at them, which enables hands-free presentation. Although many HUD-based systems have been developed for proofof-concept or demonstration purposes, there have been few user studies on the practical use of HUD-based systems in CAI. We examined a practical CAI system used to manipulate the equipment in the transportable earth station. We first report on a preliminary experiment to investigate the readability and operability of HMDs. A single-sided HMD outperformed a two-sided HMD with regard to transcript tasks. In addition, we performed a usability study to compare the HUD-based CAI system to conventional printed materials and laptop PCs. The result of the operation tasks showed the better performance for the CAI system than that for the other media, and suggested that the CAI system improved reliability of information acquisition for both the instructions and the equipment.