SPATIAL SOUND SYSTEM TO AID INTERACTIVITY IN A HUMAN CENTRED DESIGN EVALUATION OF AN AIRCRAFT CABIN ENVIRONMENT

There is a lot of research towards the concept of 3D sound in virtual reality environments. With the incipient growth in the significance of designing more realistic and immersive experiences for a Human Centred Design (HCD) approach, sound perception is believed to add an interactive element in maximizing the human perspective. In this context, the concept of an audio-visual interaction model between a passenger and a crew member in an immersive aircraft cabin environment is studied and presented in this paper. The study focuses on the design and usability of spatial sources as an interactive component in a regional aircraft cabin design for Human in the Loop evaluation. Sound sources are placed among the virtual manikins acting as passengers with the aim of building a realistic virtual environment for the user enacting the role of a crew member. The crew member, while walking throughthe cabin can orient and identify the position of the sound source inside the immersive Cabin environment. We review the 3D sound approaches and cues for sound spatialization in a virtual environment and propose that audio-visual interactivity aids the immersive Human centred design analysis

Brain–Computer Interface-Based Adaptive Automation to Prevent Out-Of-The-Loop Phenomenon in Air Traffic Controllers Dealing With Highly Automated Systems

International audienceIncreasing the level of automation in air traffic management is seen as a measure to increase the performance of the service to satisfy the predicted future demand. This is expected to result in new roles for the human operator: he will mainly monitor highly automated systems and seldom intervene. Therefore, air traffic controllers (ATCos) would often work in a supervisory or control mode rather than in a direct operating mode. However, it has been demonstrated how human operators in such a role are affected by human performance issues, known as Out-Of-The-Loop (OOTL) phenomenon, consisting in lack of attention, loss of situational awareness and de-skilling. A countermeasure to this phenomenon has been identified in the adaptive automation (AA), i.e., a system able to allocate the operative tasks to the machine or to the operator depending on their needs. In this context, psychophysiological measures have been highlighted as powerful tool to provide a reliable, unobtrusive and real-time assessment of the ATCo’s mental state to be used as control logic for AA-based systems. In this paper, it is presented the so-called “Vigilance and Attention Controller”, a system based on electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking (ET) techniques, aimed to assess in real time the vigilance level of an ATCo dealing with a highly automated human–machine interface and to use this measure to adapt the level of automation of the interface itself. The system has been tested on 14 professional ATCos performing two highly realistic scenarios, one with the system disabled and one with the system enabled. The results confirmed that (i) long high automated tasks induce vigilance decreasing and OOTL-related phenomena; (ii) EEG measures are sensitive to these kinds of mental impairments; and (iii) AA was able to counteract this negative effect by keeping the ATCo more involved within the operative task. The results were confirmed by EEG and ET measures as well as by performance and subjective ones, providing a clear example of potential applications and related benefits of AA