Verification of workplace design guidelines for the control room: Can virtual reality replace the physical mock-up?

Early identification of potential human factors guideline-violations and corrective input into the design process is desired for efficient and cost-effective control room design. Virtual Reality (VR) technology makes it possible to perform evaluation of the design of the control room at an early stage of the design process, but can we trust the results from such evaluations? This paper describes an experimental validation of a VR model against the real world in five different tasks of guideline verification. Preliminary results indicate that guideline verification in the VR model can be done with satisfactory accuracy for a number of evaluations. However, some categories of guidelines require further development of measurement tools and use of higher model resolution than the model used in this study