Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The questions 1 to 4 (see Figure 19) measured the usability of the training platform. The
results of these questions indicate that participants concentrated quite well on the task and the
platform was easy to use. Nevertheless, participants did not feel totally comfortable using the
system. Some participants suggested eliminating the use of keyboard for sending commands
to the application by adding more buttons in the stylus of the haptic device. Moreover, they
suggested increasing the duration of the familiarisation session in order to increase the level
of confidence using the training platform.
The questions from 5 to 8 evaluated the system as a training tool. As showed in Figure 20,
participants were quite confident to perform the real task and rated the system with a score
of 5.7 (in the direct aids group) and 5.9 (in the indirect aids groups) as a training tool. Some
of the participants in the group of direct aids commented that they did not like to be forced to
make an attempt of grasping the correct brick before being able to receive the aid.
5. Conclusions and future research
This chapter presents a new Multimodal Training System for assembly and disassembly
procedural tasks. Some features of this system are:
• It supports the approach of
learning by doing
by means of an active multimodal interaction
(visual, audio and haptic) with the virtual scenario, eliminating the constraints of using the
physical (real) scenario: mainly availability, time, cost, and safety constraints. For example,
providing training when the machine is still in the design phase or it is working and can
not be stopped or when errors during the training can damage the machine or the trainee.
• It provides different multimodal aids, not available in the real world, that help and guide
the trainees during the training process.
• Its flexibility to adapt itself to the demands of the task and to the preferences/needs of
the trainees, for example: flexibility in the available training strategies, flexibility in the
sensory channel used to provide feedback and flexibility in the supported haptic devices.
In this work the characteristics, advantages and dissavantages of the use of VR Technologies
for training were also described. One of the main drawbacks in the use of Virtual Training
Systems is that trainees become increasingly dependent on the features of these systems which
may inhibit the ability to perform the task in the absence of them. This negative effect in the
use of virtual aids was analyzed in the experiment described in this chapter and the findings
suggest that the use of a strategy based on providing direct aids in a controlled way does not
damage the knowledge transfer from the virtual system to the real world.
This outcome is in contrast with other research works that shows the negative effects of the
use of direct aids. Moreover, from the point of view of the authors, the use of direct aids could
reduce the training time and therefore increase the efficiency of the training process. In this
way, further experiments should be run in order to analyze in which way the use of direct aids
could decrease the training time without damaging the final performance of the trainees.
During the experiment described in this chapter, the authors detected three main behaviour
patterns in the participants that can be useful to define some design recommendations for the
design of the virtual aids:
1. Participants who like trying by themselves the next action but when they do not know how
to continue they request help. In this case, it would not be necessary to add any constraint
to be able to receive the aid, it would be enough that the aid was provided on demand.
