Enhancing Marine Navigation Performance Using the Head-Up Interface

Modern marine navigation places significant physical and mental demands on officers stationed on ship bridges, primarily due to the continuous observation and evaluation of real-time navigational information displayed on scattered electronic equipment. To alleviate the high cognitive load experienced by marine officers and allow them to focus on essential tasks during complex situations, the integration of head-up displays (HUDs) in marine applications has emerged as a promising solution. HUDs offer the potential to provide crucial information, enhancing the accessibility and organization of previously disordered data. However, there is limited information on the impact of HUDs on marine officers, which has been explored in the presented work. In this work, a novel immersive navigation experiment with three conditions: traditional display (NonAR), augmented reality (AR) based information presentation, and a variant of AR with essential information only (AR-Indicator) has been conducted. The objective is to explore the effects of these three conditions on navigation performance and mental workload. Our findings indicate that the AR-based information presentation, specifically the variant that includes only essential information, is preferred by participants and showed performance improvements measured by time to complete tasks, gaze duration, and pupil dilation compared to the traditional display and full AR condition. These results have an impact on the design and development of HUDs in marine-related tasks. This pilot research sheds light on the potential benefits of HUDs in improving maritime navigation and paves the way for further advancements in this field.