...at the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation.
EUROCONTROL, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, has analysed the importance of direct observation for the control tower activity.
The research is motivated by the interest in assessing the applicability of augmented reality technology for Air Traffic Management (ATM). The hypothesis is that augmented reality has the biggest potential when a human operator, in this case the air traffic controller, is largely dependant on visual information, i.e. information retrieved by direct observation of the real world scene. Therefore the EUROCONTROL Agency is initially focussing on tower operations.
In particular, they want to find out if direct observation provides unique information (i.e. not available from other sources) and, more generally, which information can be obtained by it. Once this is known, it may be possivle to design augmented reality environments which assist the tower control acitivity.
In an observation study, INTERACT was used to record paramenters of activities, produce graphic representation of data and obtain basic statistic analysis.
More about the study can be found here...
(Pinska, E.; Bourgois, M; Behavioural Analysis of the Tower Controller Activity. EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre, Innovative Research, Activity Report 2005)
