OZ: An Innovative Primary Flight Display

The proposed SBIR project will develop OZ, an innovative primary flight display for aircraft. The OZ display, designed from "first principles" of vision science, cognition, and Human-Centered Computing, brings all cockpit information required for flight together into a single, unified display that uses a common frame of reference employing both the focal and ambient channels of human visual processing. This proposal addresses Topic A1.05 Crew Systems Technologies for Improved Aviation Safety. It specifically addresses the goals of ensuring appropriate situation awareness and facilitating and extending human perception, information interpretation, and response planning and selection. Its primary focus is in the SBIR topical areas of interest in Data fusion technologies for real-time integration and integrity checking of single source information streams of varying spatial and temporal resolution; and Human-centered technologies to improve the access and performance of less-experienced operators and pilots from special population groups. Previous experimentation has shown that OZ provides significantly better performance for pilots than conventional flight instrumentation. The proposal will test the feasibility of using OZ to provide situational awareness superior to that provided by both conventional instrumentation and commercially available electronic primary flight displays. Phase I will show that OZ is also superior to existing electronic primary flight displays that display conventional flight instrumentation on an electronic display and will develop and demonstrate a prototype OZ system in a general aviation aircraft. In Phase II the prototype system will be flight tested against competing electronic flight information systems and a DO-178B compliant OZ system will be developed and flight tested to determine its suitability for FAA certification for general aviation aircraft.