Tactical cockpits-the coming revolution

Abstract

It is pointed out that a cockpit revolution is in the making. Many of the promised, but little delivered technologies of the 1970s and 1980s will finally come of age in the 1990s just in time to complement the data explosion coming from sensor and processing advances. Technologies such as helmet systems, large flat panel displays, speech recognition, color graphics, decision aiding, and stereopsis are simultaneously reaching technology maturities that promise big payoffs for the third-generation cockpit and beyond. The author examines tactical cockpit problems and the technologies needed to solve them and recommends three generations of solutions. He discusses what the third-generation cockpit might look like and how it might integrate many of the above-mentioned technologies.<>