The Reality Files #10
The Super Cockpit (1986) by Thomas A. Furness
Tom Furness is generally acknowledged as one of the VR pioneers. The paper covered here was written during his time at Armstrong Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in Ohio, US. It was published in 1986 in the Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Human Factors Society.
The study into the ‘super cockpit’ was conducted as part of US Air Force’s need to identify future technologies with a 20 to 30 year timeframe. In the paper, Furness envisions how to exploit “the natural perceptual, cognitive, and psychomotor capabilities of the operator” — this set of goals is very similar to what we today see as the promise of VR and spatial computing and the embodied forms of human-computer interaction they enable.
Furness elaborates on the problem:
Existing cockpits constrain the transfer of information from the machine to the human. Panel-mounted displays and limited field-of-view head-up displays act as two-dimensional “peep holes” into the three-dimensional word in which the pilot must operate.
He also mentions how “low bandwidth” interaction devices which take a lot of learning to master, such as joysticks, exacerbate the issue.
