HUD symbology evaluation in a virtual reality flight simulation

PubDate: July 2014

Teams: Airbus Group Innovations

Writers: Daniel Dreyer；Matthias Oberhauser；Daniel Bandow

PDF: HUD symbology evaluation in a virtual reality flight simulation

Abstract

In this paper, a virtual reality flight simulator for the evaluation of cockpit concepts is described. This simulator consists of Virtual Reality equipment (head/finger tracking and Head-Mounted Display), commercial flight simulation software, and recording devices (cameras and eye-tracking). To show the setup’s evaluation capabilities, a concept for an enhanced Head-Up Guidance Symbology will be compared with a conventional system. The new concept was designed to increase head-up percentage leading to optimized situational awareness, thus reducing the number of head-movements, accommodations and adaptations as factors for increasing workload. Behavioural data (eye-tracking data, head-up time) and questionnaires (SART, NASA-TLX) indicate that the new concept reaches this goal and increases pilots’ situational awareness during head-up guided approaches. Eventually, all participating pilots reported that the virtual reality flight simulator is an adequate tool for evaluating cockpit concepts.