Steering a simulated unmanned aerial vehicle using a head-slaved camera and HMD: effects of HMD quality, visible vehicle references, and extended stereo cueing

In the simulator experiment reported here we examined several parameters influencing the performance of the operator of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). This operator was fitted with an HMD which showed images from the camera onboard of the UAV. The camera was slaved to the operator's head so that the camera movements mimicked the head movements. We examined steering performance for two HMD types: the low-end, LCD-based Virtual IO i-glasses, and the high-end, CRT-based n-vision datavisor. Additional parameters were the presence of vehicle references in the images as an indication of camera orientation and the presence of stereo and hyper-stereo. Performance with the n- vision HMD was considerably better than with the i-glasses HMD, a difference which could not be attributed solely to the difference in field-of-view. The presence of vehicle references led to a modest improvement in performance. Stereo and hyper-stereo did not improve performance for this particular task.