2023-10-31, Auer, Stefan, Anthes, Christoph, Reiterer, Harald, Jetter, Hans-Christian

Safety-critical interactive spaces for supervision and time-critical control tasks are usually characterized by many small displays and physical controls, typically found in control rooms or automotive, railway, and aviation cockpits. Using Virtual Reality (VR) simulations instead of a physical system can significantly reduce the training costs of these interactive spaces without risking real-world accidents or occupying expensive physical simulators. However, the user's physical interactions and feedback methods must be technologically mediated. Therefore, we conducted a within-subjects study with 24 participants and compared performance, task load, and simulator sickness during training of authentic aircraft cockpit manipulation tasks. The participants were asked to perform these tasks inside a VR flight simulator (VRFS) for three feedback methods (acoustic, haptic, and acoustic+haptic) and inside a physical flight simulator (PFS) of a commercial airplane cockpit. The study revealed a partial equivalence of VRFS and PFS, control-specific differences input elements, irrelevance of rudimentary vibrotactile feedback, slower movements in VR, as well as a preference for PFS.

2021, Mayer, Janine, Auer, Stefan, Friedl, Judith, Anthes, Christoph

2021, Auer, Stefan, Gerken, Jens, Reiterer, Harald, Jetter, Hans-Christian

Airlines and flying schools use high-end physical flight simulators (PFS) to reduce costs and risks of pilot training. However, such PFS with full-scale cockpits have very high acquisition and operation costs. In contrast, recent consumer-grade and off-the-shelf soft- and hardware can be used to create increasingly realistic virtual reality flight simulators (VRFS) that could potentially serve as cost-efficient and flexible alternatives. We present a user study with 11 participants to determine whether consumer-grade VRFS can supplement or even replace a PFS during cockpit familiarization training (CFT). We compared a full-scale Boeing 737-800NG PFS with a VRFS based on off-the-shelf flight simulator software combined with a consumer-grade head-mounted display and either finger tracking or a handheld controller as input device. Participants performed instrument reading tasks and check procedures from the aircraft’s operating manual. We did not observe statistically significant differences in successful instrument reading tasks, error rates and task completion between PFS and VRFS during CFT. However, we found that VRFS’ Mental Demand, Physical Demand, Effort, task completion times, and levels of simulator sickness were significantly higher and exceeded acceptable levels. We conclude that future consumer-grade VRFS will need to improve soft- and hard- ware for interacting with simulated switches and reduce simulator sickness before they can serve as PFS alternatives for CFT.