Assisting Human-centred Ship Bridge Design through Virtual Reality
Authors: Mu Bingyu , Bin Guo Fang , Chu Xiaohui 
Published: June 2024

The maritime industry is experiencing rapid evolution, fueled by technological advancements that offer unprecedented opportunities for enhancing navigation performances. Virtual Reality (VR), renowned for its immersive and interactive capabilities, has successfully penetrated various domains. Integrating VR into ship bridge design promises to redefine design capabilities by facilitating interactive scenarios, engaging end-users and stakeholders, and streamlining both design production and evaluation processes. This paper presents an innovative approach to leverage VR technology as a transformative tool in the human-centered ship bridge design process. The focus is on enhancing performances during maritime navigation. The proposed methodology underscores the pivotal roles of prototypes and scenarios in producing and evaluating design concepts. It elucidates which design phases and activities in ship bridge design procedure are suitable for utilizing VR prototypes and scenarios, contributing to a more informed and participatory design process.Despite advancements in navigation equipment and automated aids, human errors persist as significant contributors to maritime accidents (Grech, 2008). Acknowledging this, the necessity is to address latent risks and underlying problems associated with human errors (Wróbel, 2021). As Norman (2019) proposed, shifting from technology-centered design to human-centered design (HCD), will benefit the complex social-technical system of ship bridge, to to upgrade the human machine interaction (HMI) with minimum cognitive load and optimal situation awareness (SA).VR technology, recognized for its effectiveness in maritime crew training, offers experiential learning through well-designed simulation tasks (Stevens and Kincaid, 2015). The "sense of being there" in virtual environments enhances spatial understanding, providing navigators with contextual and scenario-based learning experiences (Mallam and Nazir, 2021). Beyond training, the paper advocates for leveraging VR in ship bridge domain for iterative design processes and usability tests, ensuring a friendly and intuitive user experience (UX).VR is confirmed as a novel mode of visualisation and interaction to support design reviews (Wolfartsberger, 2019). Representative prototypes were adopted in usability testing within the cycled design process to help designers identifying problems and seeking correction. By engaging with end-users, those model representations (physical & digital, 2D & 3D, with & without context) could elicit useful feedback on design parmeters basing on partipated users’ experiential refelctions, which increase designers’ understandings of user needs, working contexts, and existing design issues, and inpired innovative and well-supported design solutions (Osterman, Berlin, and Bligard, 2016). In most cases, the physical prototype’s production are time-consuming and expensive. Additionally, it always requires more time and effort for remaking to adapt design changes. VR can make up for the deficiency of physical prototypes forementioned. Besides, it create realistic environment and scenarios for participants to engage and interact with. In summary, VR enables cost benefits and agility in the design and development process. Recently, a web-based collabrative platform launched for designing ,sharing, and reviewing 3D models (Bezel, 2022), which may help design and develop team to accelarte working efficiency on VR environment establishment. Moreover, VR-based evaluation approach can simulate a dynamic and immersive context which allows review design solutions both by designers and participated users during an intuitive interaction process. The use of VR has been adopted in automobile sector to execute usability testing with virtual prototypes, dynamic simulations, and component aesthetic evaluations (Freitas et al., 2020). The domain of ship bridge should also orchestrate with VR during the iterative design process for enhanced performances of maritime navigation. In this complex and safety-critical realm, ensuring the optimal SA for navigators is paramount. VR has potentials to integrate the SA assessing measurements into the scenarios intuitively to avoid bias results caused by interventions.In summary, this paper proposes a methodology for applying VR techniques in human-centered ship bridge design. It demonstrates periodical outcomes of developed VR prototypes and scenarios, aiming to minimize cognitive workload and optimize situational awareness in maritime navigation. The findings are expected to benefit ship bridge designers and have broader implications for creating intuitive HMIs in contemporary industries.