Assessment of a Gaze-aided User Interface to Assist in the Visually-intensive Workloads of Air Traffic Controllers Joshua Wade and Yiming Wang

Introduction Air Traffic Control (ATC) Aerodome/Tower ATC vs Remote ATC Secondary Surveillance Radar Controllers

Introduction Problem ATC is highly stressful High demand on visual awareness Complex mental-transformations of coordinate spaces Potential Solution Use technology to reduce the complexity of the task Simulate possible interface using virtual reality (VR) and eye-tracking for proof of concept

Introduction Hypotheses 1. A gaze-aided system would improve the performance of ATC controllers 2. ATC controllers would spend more time looking at aircraft in the environment and less time looking at other (distracting) objects

Application Design Development Environment VR Module Unity3d Maya Gaze Module Tobii X120 eye tracker Standalone Application (C#) LAN TCP Sockets

User Evaluation Protocol ✦ Session Structure practice mode interaction methods 15 tasks per session 3 types of tasks 1.takeoff 2.landing 3.collision-prevention short breaks between tasks questionnaires (3) ✦ Group Comparison between subjects 2 groups (G1 and G2) 1.G1 with gaze-aided system 2.G2 without gaze-aided system

User Evaluation Participants 10 total (7 M, 3 F) 9 aged years, 1 aged years All participants were students 4 experienced with VR 3 experienced with eye tracking

User Evaluation

Results Gaze Significant difference between total time spent looking at ROI during a session (p < 0.05), with G2 spending more time looking at ROI than G1

Results Performance No significant difference in number of failures (p= 0.25 ) No significant difference in time taken to complete tasks unless outliers were removed (p=0.43 with outliers, p=0.01 without outliers)

Results Questionnaires All questions scored on a 7 point Likert scale (range 0-6) No comparison between groups in Post-practice questionnaire Post-session questionnaire: no statistically significant results, but several small p-values

Discussion Questionnaires Post-practice: 1. Hotspot & Keyboard were equally-liked, but Keyboard was chosen by 8 of 10 participants 2. Participants felt the text could have been presented more clearly Post-session: 1. Seems that participants in G1 were generally more bored, more frustrated, and more stressed than participants in G2, although the p-values were not significant 2. Despite having the gaze-aided system, G1 participants appear to have reported a generally more negative experience overall than G2 Gaze Result did not confirm our 2 nd hypothesis Performance Results did confirm our 1 st hypothesis when outliers were removed from the data set

Conclusion