Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 1 November 2010, is one of a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It proposes a provisional cockpit design for craft driven by speculative breakthrough propulsion, such as control of gravity and inertia and faster-than-light travel. It draws mainly on the book Frontiers of Propulsion Science and on human-machine interface research.
UNCLASSIFIED/;SflHl 8FFHil.t.k Wfili IH.k\f effort on the part of the operator and are more prone to mode errors and keyhole effects, particularly during high-stress situations. It was also found that automatically changing display formats added anxiety and mistrust of the system, because the user was now burdened with the additional task of determining why the display just changed. A survey of Boeing 757 and 767 pilots in 1989 revealed that over half felt their workload had actually increased by the high levels of automation introduced into these cockpits. In practice, users forced adaptive displays into fixed displays to improve their utility. 35 The ultimate lesson is that the most critical displays should be fixed to take advantage of the naturally efficient search method where humans use mental models that are analogous to physical objects. For other functions that are less time-critical and where further details are required (e.g., entering destinations and way points into a flight plan), adaptive displays are more advantageous because they require less console space. Other lessons include the following: 36 • Following the same recommendations for the individual elements of adaptive displays that are given for graphical and alphanumeric display components. • Matching the performance characteristics of the displays to the operator's own internal model of the system, and they should be structured to accommodate a user's knowledge. • Packaging information into appropriate, meaningful clusters. • Representing logical and causal relationships should be implemented. • Using "fewer displayed variables with many states" is recommended over the display of "many variables with few states." This necessitates arranging variables in a hierarchy where the lower-level variables are combined into higher-level variables. • Using color to improve the speed of human comprehension. • Accessing back-up information should be easy (familiar procedure), and it should be easy to browse through the system without disturbing its operation. Virtual Displays and Augmented Reality An extension of the adaptive screen is a virtual display where the information is projected into a field of view without the need for a physical display screen. These can function as adaptive displays or be used with gesture-based input systems. Although far-future cockpit technology is still being researched, this study assumes it to be fully matured, such that any information can be displayed clearly in the pilot's full field of view. That being said, the other recommendations about accommodating human norms and the lessons of adaptive displays should be heeded. By that, it is meant that the critical information should remain consistent, and the functions that can tolerate slower user actions can be accommodated with pop-up screens. Also, rather than relying solely on a virtual display, the critical displays should still have a physical, redundant set of displays. 24 UNCLASSIFIED,','Flilll. &FFUil,t.le lal!il! 8Hl!V
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 57 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.