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Immersion in the real world: Towards an integrated global simulator environment
Technical Paper
2002-11-0010
Sector:
Language:
English
Abstract
While full flight simulators provide high fidelity models of the
aircraft systems and performance, the air traffic and weather
environment in which flight simulator trainees are immersed is
still quite barren and static. On one hand, the simulators
themselves are now near perfect copies of the real aircraft, but on
the other, they still operate in relatively sterile surroundings.
Nature seems frozen in place and there are few or no contacts with
other traffic or traffic control elements, except for what may be
role-played by the onboard instructor. In contrast, real life
traffic is more congested than ever, and pilots in terminal
airspace and on airport grounds are literally bombarded with
sensory inputs, both visual and aural, as they negotiate their way
through traffic and adverse weather phenomena. While flight
simulators are a great means of testing and improving motor and
decision skills, the environment could be greatly improved to
provide better training of situational awareness skills.
In order to rectify this situation, an integrated weather,
traffic and air traffic control environment is required. Such an
environment must provide the simulator crew with a full virtual
reality experience, complete with visual representations of the
traffic and weather, correlated sound and aerodynamic effects and
realistic radio communications. In order to be believable, the
simulated environment must be fully customizable. This would allow
all aspects of the weather and traffic to be rendered
representatively, from localized, dynamic weather systems to
seamless enroute variations, airport-specific procedures to
cultural accents. Of course, all this must be provided in such a
way that instructor involvement remains minimal, which requires the
capability to define complex and detailed off-line scenarios that
can later be selected and executed during trainign or evaluation
sessions.
Generating a complex, yet easy-to-use and cost-effective
environment poses a real challenge. This paper will cover the
virtual environment approaches currently in use on aircraft
simulators and their visual systems, highlighting areas of recent
advancement and, for those requiring further improvement, potential
avenues of development.