Evaluation of laser dazzling induced task performance degradation

When studying the impact of laser dazzle on the human vision, three categories of parameters are of influence: those related to the human eye, the characteristics of the laser source itself, and environmental parameters such as target size and contrast, position of the target with respect to the laser dazzler, and ambient light level. The effects are most often translated into a decrease of the field-of-view of the eye but the question remains how this translates into human task performance degradation. More specifically, the research question for this study is the following: can we quantify the performance degradation of military specific tasks in a land environment when being dazzled by a portable laser system? Two main measurement campaigns have been organized to answer this question: a driving test to allow benchmarking with the literature, and a shooting test. The registered time and scoring of the specific tests have been statistically analyzed to determine the significant effects. The results of the driving test confirm those described in the literature; the results of the shooting test give insight in the main parameters of interest. Moreover, the outcomes of the two trials show that there is a need for a specific test protocol to find the correct compromise between environmental validity of a trial and the number of independent variables that can be controlled.