Keep Sailing: An Investigation of Effective Navigation Controls and Subconscious Learning in Simulated Maritime Environment

Simulation engines are gradually being used by researchers for creating maritime datasets for various analysis, detection and surveillance purposes. However, ship behaviour modeling only through scripts has limited scope. An interactive interface for ship behavior modeling can be a creative and durable solution towards generating multiple divergent scenarios from the same set up. Based on this idea, we have investigated the effectiveness of Mouse, Keyboard and Gamepad navigation controls in terms of task completion rate, error rate and task completion time in a gamified user interface. The same interface can be used to generate maritime simulated datasets with little effort. Upon examining 15 participants, we found that Mouse is the superior control in terms of task completion rate with a mean of 86% and a p value of 0.0337. Additionally, none of the three controls showed statistical significance in terms of error rate or time taken for task completion. Furthermore, we explored the field of subconscious learning of Navy ship properties from our interactive tasks in simulated environment.