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A 3D Stereoscopic Head-Up Display (HUD) using direct projection on a transparent screen is presented. Symbol incrustation in conformity with the landscape is performed through the use of simulated collimation offering a large eye-box, in excess of conventional HUD. The use of spectral glasses for our transparent screen was decided as most commonly used polarizing or active glasses were not adapted. Furthermore it gave ususeful green laser attack protection.

The efficiency of the glass cockpit paradigm has faded away with the densification of the aeronautical environment. Today's problem lies with “non-defective aircraft” monitored by “perfectly trained crews” still involved in fatal accidents. One explanation is, at crew level, that we have reached a system complexity that, while acceptable in normal conditions, is hardly compatible with human cognitive abilities in degraded conditions. The current mitigation of such risk still relies on the enforcement through intensive training of an ability to manage extremely rare (off-normal) situations. These are explained by the potential combination of failures of highly complex systems with variable environment & with variable humans.

As touch screens are everywhere in the consumer market Thales has launched in depth evaluations on their introduction in the cockpit. One of the challenges is to verify its compatibility with in flight use under turbulence conditions, including light, moderate and severe. In flight accelerometer collections were performed to provide us with a baseline for choosing between possible simulation solutions. Thales recognized early on the need for such a tool as it would enable us to define recommendations for our HMI designs. The objectives were first to validate specific complex touch/gestures using all the potential of touch interactions for novel cockpit Human Machine Interfaces and second to look into the various physical anchoring solutions capable of facilitating touch screens interactions in aeronautical turbulent environments. Given the 6 axis accelerometer profiles that were collected, only an hexapod structure was capable of reproducing those profiles with acceptable validity.