Managing Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Information Employing a Reduced Area / Depth Separated Display

Abstract

Command and control in a military battlefield environment requires a large amount of information to be integrated rapidly. In situations where Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are implemented, a single controller may have to supervise many UAV assets. During any given mission, the controller is required to manage multiple UAV elements such as flight parameters, target locations, and aircraft locations. This series of studies investigated the effect of display type on information presentation during a visual search task. The displays tested included a multi-depth display, a single display (toggling between two windows), and multiple displays set side-by-side. The multi-depth display is known as a True-Depth Display (TDD) which creates depth by the simultaneous use of two display surfaces in one visual space by means of a combiner glass. No significant differences were found between the use of a TDD and multiple displays in the first study. A significant difference was found between the use of a single display and multiple displays in the second study. Having no other significant effects or interactions might indicate that when space is limited, such as in a command and control vehicle, it appears as though the TDD will perform adequately when response time and accuracy are important for simple search tasks.