Effective use of stereoptic 3D cueing to declutter complex flight displays

This paper reports a workstation experiment to verify the potential of stereo cueing for the declutter function in a simulated tracking task. The experimental task was designed as similar to tracking in a conventional flight director, although the format presented was a very cluttered dynamic display. The subject's task was to use a hand-controller to keep a tracking symbol on top of a target symbol. In the basic tracking task, the target symbol is presented as a red `X' and the tracking symbol as a blue `X,' which provides some declutter and makes the task more reasonable in terms of performance. The color coding was removed in one display condition to provide some additional clutter. For this condition, both the target and tracking symbols are presented as red `Xs.' Additional clutter was provided by the inclusion of moving, differently colored `X' symbols. Stereo depth was utilized by placing any clutter in a plane in front of the display monitor, placing the tracking symbol at screen depth, and placing the target symbol behind the screen. The results from eight subjects revealed that the stereo presentation effectively offset the cluttering effects.

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