Evaluation of Body Sway in Artificial Ship Rolling and Pitching

A navigator guides a ship for safe and efficient navigation, and s/he gets navigational information through the five senses. Visual information is most important because it is said to occupy more than eighty percents to whole information. We are researching the relationship between the visual image of seascape and the physiological/body response using ship bridge simulator, which is used to train and educate ship handling and how to handle a navigational instrument. The simulator-based training is popular worldwide. The simulator is able to control the traffic situation and to do the same scenarios for trainees. On the merchant ship simulator-based training, the ship movements-rolling, pitching, yawing, etc., never simulate by vision or motion platform. However, the ship movement is an important factor for the simulator-based training, and we need to confirm the influence of body and mental workload for the simulated ship movements. The purpose of this paper is to find characteristics of body response to artificial ship movements by vision and motion platform. The result shows characteristics of body response to artificial rolling and pitching by vision and motion platform differ.