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Experiments and flight tests have shown that a Head-Up Display (HUD) and a head-down, electronic moving map
(EMM) can be enhanced with Synthetic Vision for airport surface operations. While great success in ground operations
was demonstrated with a HUD, the research noted that two major HUD limitations during ground operations were their
monochrome form and limited, fixed field of regard. A potential solution to these limitations found with HUDs may be
emerging Head Worn Displays (HWDs). HWDs are small, lightweight full color display devices that may be worn
without significant encumbrance to the user. By coupling the HWD with a head tracker, unlimited field-of-regard may
be realized for commercial aviation applications. In the proposed paper, the results of two ground simulation
experiments conducted at NASA Langley are summarized. The experiments evaluated the efficacy of head-worn
display applications of Synthetic Vision and Enhanced Vision technology to enhance transport aircraft surface
operations. The two studies tested a combined six display concepts: (1) paper charts with existing cockpit displays, (2)
baseline consisting of existing cockpit displays including a Class III electronic flight bag display of the airport surface;
(3) an advanced baseline that also included displayed traffic and routing information, (4) a modified version of a HUD
and EMM display demonstrated in previous research; (5) an unlimited field-of-regard, full color, head-tracked HWD
with a conformal 3-D synthetic vision surface view; and (6) a fully integrated HWD concept. The fully integrated HWD
concept is a head-tracked, color, unlimited field-of-regard concept that provides a 3-D conformal synthetic view of the
airport surface integrated with advanced taxi route clearance, taxi precision guidance, and data-link capability. The
results of the experiments showed that the fully integrated HWD provided greater path performance compared to using
paper charts alone. Further, when comparing the HWD with the HUD concept, there were no differences in path
performance. In addition, the HWD and HUD concepts were rated via paired-comparisons the same in terms of
situational awareness and workload. However, there were over twice as many taxi incursion events with the HUD than
the HWD.
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