Evaluation of visual cues of three-dimensional virtual environments for helicopter simulators

Abstract

Visual cues are an essential part of helicopter flight simulators. The required cues for hover are particularly large, due to closeness to the ground and small movements. However, the research on low-altitude helicopter flight is limited. In this research, the density and height of the three-dimensional (3D) objects in the scene are analysed to find their effect on hovering and low-altitude helicopter flight. An experiment is conducted using a personal computer-based flight simulator on 10 professional military pilots. The results revealed that 3D object density and 3D object height affect both horizontal and vertical hovering performance. In hover and low-altitude flight, altitude control is positively affected by smaller object height. Paradoxically, the pilots preferred the scenes composed of tall and mixture objects. Pilot distance estimation was significantly affected by the knowledge of both object density and object height, but these factors do not individually improve distance estimation.