Initial / Junior Warfare Officer Performance Capture Tool: Research Milestone Summary
Abstract
Increasing Junior/Initial Warfare Officer student failure rates during bridge simulator navigation courses have been noted by Royal Navy officials at HMS Collingwood. It was suspected that this was occurring as a result of some students’ inability to be able to correlate 2D information on charts and radar screens with the actual dynamic 3D situation, as seen out of the simulated bridge windows. The failure rate situation has, apparently, been increasing since the introduction of the Initial or “Junior” Warfare Officer (I/JWO) simulators in December of 1995. This report is a short summary of an informal assessment of I/JWO tasks and performance features conducted during a single day’s exposure to simulator assessments at HMS Collingwood (Endeavour Building), which resulted in the development of a prototype trainee multitasking performance capture tool, based upon an OpenGL-based, PC-hosted part-task simulator.
Initial feedback from stakeholders at HMS Collingwood has been favourable. Following the incorporation of stakeholder comments and requests into a second version of the demonstrator (under way at the time of writing), it is planned to integrate the simulation with the existing PC-based training and assessment software suite at HMS Collingwood and to conduct a series of longitudinal (pre- and post-sea deployment) assessments with I/JWOs.
This study was performed as part of a Master of Engineering (MEng) project at the University of Birmingham’s Department of Electronic, Electrical & Computer Engineering. As such, the work conducted during this project has been delivered to the Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre (HFI DTC) as contribution in kind. Full copies of the MEng student’s Final Report and/or copies of the initial software implementation of the I/JWO Performance Capture Tool are available on request (r.j.stone@bham.ac.uk). It should be noted that the software demonstrator described herein is prototype in nature and should not be considered to represent the finished tool. In its current form, the tool should be accepted “as is” and is (at present) supported neither by the University of Birmingham, nor the HFI DTC.
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