An Evaluation of Latency in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Helmet Mounted Display

Abstract

The current study investigated the impact of latency on pilot performance when conducting night operational tasks in the F-35 helmet-mounted display (HMD) with use of Distributed Aperture Sensor (DAS) video. The type of latency investigated was event latency, the latency associated with the transit time of information captured at the DAS sensor on the aircraft to the display of the information to the last pixel settled on the HMD. Four night tasks and six levels of event latency were used in an F-35 full mission simulator (FMS) to assess the impact on pilot performance. Limited to the tasks investigated, the results of the current study show that the impact of event latency in the HMD on pilot performance is task dependent. Where pilot performance was impacted (aerial refuel, high-gain task), the precise level of DAS latency causing the degradation in task performance occurred at the 167ms latency level. Since latency conditions above 100ms but below 167ms were not investigated, the impact of event latency within this range cannot be determined from the current results. More research exploring different types of high-gain versus low-gain tasks is needed to expand upon the results of the current study and to better define the limits of event latency in a HMD.