The upcoming 4th Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) is based on data collection and analysis from mechanical equipment equipped with sensors. Typically, the operating parameters of an installation are controlled by engineers who are brought into control centers, where an array of varying size screens and instruments show the operating status of a system. This physical work environment can be replaced by a virtual reality environment, which can extend the data seen in space, 360 degrees around the engineer. In this paper, we demonstrate such a virtual environment which is based on sensor information flowing to the user in real time and focus on spatially-enabled multimodal ways to present event alerts. Using 3D audio and directed lighting to guide users attention to the alert-raising instruments, we find that the use of 3D audio, whether stand-alone or in conjunction with visual feedback, positively impacts task performance in locating and dismissing alert sources.
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Spatial Multimodal Alert Cues for Virtual Reality Control Environments in Industry 4.0