Exploring Short-Term Training Effects of Ecological Interfaces: A Case Study in Air Traffic Control

In many work domains, the push toward higher levels of automation raises the concern of diminishing human expertise. Ecological interfaces could help operators in retaining and potentially even in acquiring expertise as they are hypothesized to lead to a deeper understanding of the work domain. This study explores the short-term impact of...

Manual Control with Pursuit Displays: New Insights, New Models, New Issues

Mathematical control models are widely used in tuning manual control systems and understanding human performance. The most common model, the crossover model, is severely limited, however, in describing realistic human control behaviour in relevant control tasks as it is only valid for tracking with a compensatory display. This paper first...

Blind driving by means of auditory feedback

Driving is a safety-critical task that predominantly relies on vision. However, visual information from the environment is sometimes degraded or absent. In other cases, visual information is available, but the driver fails to use it due to distraction or impairment. Providing drivers with real-time auditory feedback about the state of the...

Sonifying the location of an object: A comparison of three methods

Auditory displays are promising for informing operators about hazards or objects in the environment. However, it remains to be investigated how to map distance information to a sound dimension. In this research, three sonification approaches were tested: Beep Repetition Rate (BRR) in which beep time and inter-beep time were a linear function...

Ecological Interface for Collaboration of Multiple UAVs in Remote Areas

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be used to access remote areas, e.g., for surveillance missions. Collaboration between them can help overcome communication constraints by building airborne relay networks that allow beyond line of sight communication. This research investigates whether a single human operator can supervise multiple UAVs in a...

Cybernetics of Tunnel-in-the-Sky Displays

Consensus is growing that the flexibility gained with the introduction of programmable, electronic cockpit displays in the 1980s must be exploited to the full extent. An important candidate to become the primary flight display of future flight decks is the tunnel-in-the-sky display, a perspective flight-path display that shows the reference...