Does using a large screen in your control room make a difference in time to accomplish a task?
Senior design project for students from Wright State University examined the performance impact of using a large monitor at a distance to display the same data that could be display to the operator at their normal workstation (objects farther away need to be larger in order for them to have some legibility as items up close). An experiment was conducted that that showed that it took slightly longer to perform the same task when using the larger monitor farther away. Inexplicably, tasks with data in the corners of the display yielded longer times than those in the center sections.
The objective of the experiment is to answer the question, “Are there any differences in operator performance based on monitor size and distance to the monitor?”
What impact does the large monitor have on operator performance? Does the location of information on a screen have any impact on time to detect/respond?
Presentation at 2012 COP Board Meeting