Air traffic control (ATC) is a human-dependent safety critical activity therefore
the information that is made available to the human decision-maker - the controller - is
of extreme importance. In ATC, the design of human machine interfaces requires
particular attention, especially when a new technology is considered. To support the
investigation on the applicability of the new 3D Virtual Reality technology for air traffic
control, our strategy has been to establish parallel, mutually beneficial technology driven
design and human-centered evaluation approaches. The technology-driven investigation
aims at exploring all features that can be offered by 3D stereoscopic visualization and
multimodal interactions technologies while the ultimate goal of the human-centered
investigation is to empirically uncover the main implications derived from the adoption
of 3D stereoscopic interface for ATC, with particular attention to controllers’
acceptability.
The visualization is implemented as the Python module written in C++ for the
Python C API. The project enables implementation of other aeronautics objects for visualization.