ARTS: Augmented Reality Tactical Sandbox for improved situational awareness in a multi-user scenario

Abstract The Augmented Reality Tactical Sandbox (ARTS) is an augmented reality (AR)application that provides real-time immersive analytics of mission-critical information over a virtual map using a head-mounted display (HMD). Prior studies into AR concentrate on single-user experiences rather than having multiple users interacting with each other in the same AR realm. The research is especially lacking when considering situational awareness (SA) and in the case of more users: distributed SA (DSA). Unlike these previous studies, we focus on both the single-user experience and the multi-user experience and the differences between the two. Our application implements a service to enhance teamwork, remote collaboration, and SA. The multi-user environment is created using a client-server protocol over a RESTful HTTP service, allowing local and remote users to collaborate in real-time to accomplish objectives involving metaverse assets displayed on the map. We conducted a user experiment with 28 participants divided into two groups comparing the performance and SA of a single user and a team in a drone (co)piloting task using an AR map. We observed a carryover effect when going from a single user to a team and vice versa. There was no significant difference in SA between the tasks but overall single-user SA was better than multi-user. We also found that men performed significantly faster than women in the single-user task. The application illustrates how the concept of SA can be extended to the command and control domain.