An evaluation environment for a helmet-mounted synthetic degraded visual environment display

Degraded visual environment (DVE) is a term coined for environmental conditions that impair the visual orientation of a helicopter pilot during flight or landing. These conditions include brown-out, but also night, glare, fog and mist, as well as combinations of those. In order to assist pilots under DVE conditions DLR, the German Aerospace Center, initiated project ALLFlight. Using a combination of multi-sensor fusion, specialized symbologies for head-down and helmet-mounted display, and database augmentation the pilot should be enabled to safely operate the helicopter. Based on an earlier implementation of a synthetic head-down display an implementation for a head-tracked, helmet-mounted system is implemented. Since color is presently not an option for head-up displays, alternative symbologies have to be considered, including variations in transparency, density of terrain displays and size and shape variations for obstacle representation. In this paper we present a simulator setup for evaluating the display concepts developed. This includes various simulation stages for visual and sensor input and a flexible simulator cockpit for testing variations of display concepts. We detail the implementation architecture and present first evaluation details from a recent pilot study.