Potential of 3D audio as Human-Computer Interface in future aircraft

Upcoming cockpit designs will face new human-machine challenges related to an increasing number of pilot assistance and information systems. New cockpit designs aim to decreasing the visual workload to create free capacity in the human visual channel, which increases the information flow and lowers stress of the flight crews. At present time, none of them use spacial audio as an additional information channel. Current research considered mostly setups that are not applicable in state-of-the-art cockpits. The paper presents an experiment with a 3D audio system and a normal aviation like stereo headset. The localization performance of 23 participants under 4 different settings was calculated. Participants moved a digital ball with their head to mark the localized sound angle. The importance of head coupled movement become clear with a higher localization performance. The influence of sound frequency for warning sounds vs. human speech was not as high as expected