Effective declutter of complex flight displays using stereoptic 3-D cueing

The application of stereo technology to new, integrated pictorial display formats has been effective in situational awareness enhancements, and stereo has been postulated to be effective for the declutter of complex informational displays. This paper reports a full-factorial workstation experiment performed to verify the potential benefits of stereo cueing for the declutter function in a simulated tracking task. The experimental symbology was designed similar to that of a conventional flight director, although the format was an intentionally confused presentation that resulted in a very cluttered dynamic display. The subject's task was to use a hand controller to keep a tracking symbol, an 'X', on top of a target symbol, another X, which was being randomly driven. In the basic tracking task, both the target symbol and the tracking symbol were presented as red X's. The presence of color coding was used to provide some declutter, thus making the task more reasonable to perform. For this condition, the target symbol was coded red, and the tracking symbol was coded blue. Noise conditions, or additional clutter, were provided by the inclusion of randomly moving, differently colored X symbols. Stereo depth, which was hypothesized to declutter the display, was utilized by placing any noise in a plane in front of the display monitor, the tracking symbol at screen depth, and the target symbol behind the screen. The results from analyzing the performances of eight subjects revealed that the stereo presentation effectively offsets the cluttering effects of both the noise and the absence of color coding. The potential of stereo cueing to declutter complex informational displays has therefore been verified; this ability to declutter is an additional benefit from the application of stereoptic cueing to pictorial flight displays.