Stereoscopic augmented reality in visual interface for flight control

Head-up displays (HUD) become common equipment in aircraft cockpits. One of the possible and adequate to the HUD specifics visual pilot's interfaces is the “tunnel-in-the-sky” (3D structure on a flat screen). But according to the recent studies the tunnel-in-the-sky does not provide crucial advantages in comparison with traditional methods of presenting navigation information to pilots. This paper considers a stereoscopic version of the “tunnel-in-the-sky” realized as an augmented reality (AR) pocket-size system with see-through light-weight glasses. It consists of low-cost elements and is free of drawbacks that are inherent in the existing synthetic/enhanced vision systems. The design of experiments with desktop simulators of different AR pilot's interfaces (2D, 3D and stereo 3D conditions) and their results are described. The experiment results prove the effectiveness of the proposed stereo solution.