Evaluating Flight Performance and Eye Movement Patterns Using Virtual Reality Flight Simulator

Summary

A new virtual reality flight simulator was built, which enables efficient and low-cost evaluation of flight performance and eye movement patterns. It also provides a high-potential research tool for ergonomics and other research.

Abstract

Efficient and economical performance evaluation of pilots has become critical to the aviation industry. With the development of virtual reality (VR) and the combination of eye-tracking technology, solutions to meet these needs are becoming a reality. Previous studies have explored VR-based flight simulators, focusing mainly on technology validation and flight training. The current study developed a new VR flight simulator to evaluate pilots' flight performance based on eye movement and flight indicators in a 3D immersive scene. During the experiment, 46 participants were recruited: 23 professional pilots and 23 college students without flight experience. The experiment results showed significant differences in flight performance between participants with and without flight experience, the former being higher than the latter. In contrast, those with flight experience showed more structured and efficient eye-movement patterns. These results of the differentiation of flight performance demonstrate the validity of the current VR flight simulator as a flight performance assessment method. The different eye-movement patterns with flight experience provide the basis for future flight selection. However, this VR-based flight simulator has shortcomings like motion feedback compared to traditional flight simulators. This flight simulator platform is highly flexible except for the apparent low cost. It can meet the diverse needs of researchers (e.g., measuring situation awareness, VR sickness, and workload by adding relevant scales).

Introduction

The European Aviation Safety Agency (2012) categorizes flight simulators as training facilities, flight and navigation program trainers, flight training equipment, and complete flight simulators¹. To date, a range of flight simulators is available for training, from low-level tabletop systems to highly complicated motion-based full flight simulators². The traditional simulator includes a flight dynamics model, a system simulation, a hardware cockpit, an external visualization, and an optional motion simulation³.

These traditional flight simulators have some advantages a....

Protocol

All methods described here have been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Tsinghua University, and informed consent was obtained from all participants. After completion, all participants were paid $12 (or a gift of equal value).

1. Participant selection

1. Recruit participants according to a prior study of power analysis using G*Power software³⁵ (see Table of Materials) to ensure the participant number meets the expected sample size given by G*Power, which equals 21.
   NOTE: The expected sample size given by G*Power refers to the estimated number of parti....

Results

For the current experiment, 23 experts with flight experience and 23 novices without flight experience were chosen. The participants were between 25 and 58 years of age (experts: M = 32.52 years, SD = 7.28 years; novices: M = 29.57 years, SD = 5.74 years). The gender of all participants was male. All the novices were recruited from Tsinghua University (students or faculty), and all the experts were from China Eastern Airlines.

Eye movement

Discussion

The current study assessed if participants with flight experience had better flight performance than those without flight experience in a VR-based flight simulator. More importantly, it evaluated whether a more optimized eye movement pattern could be found in these participants with better flight performance. The results have significant differences between participants with and without flight experience in three key flying QAR indicators: pitch angle 1 s before landing, the mean distance to the reference line, a.......

Materials

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
3D engine SDK	Epic Games	Unreal Engine 4 GameAnalytics Unreal SDK	This SDK is a powerful yet flexible free analytics tool designed for games.
CPU	Intel	IntelCore i9	One of the most powerful CPU on the mainstream market.
Eye tracking SDK	Tobii	Tobii XR SDK	This SDK provide device agnostic access to eye tracking data to allow development for headsets from many different hardware vendors and is not limited to devices using Tobii Eye Tracking hardware.
Eye tracking software	Developed by the research team		A program that tracks the movement of a person's eyes while they are using a virtual reality HMD.
FlySimulator program	Developed by the research team		A software that simulates flying experiences in a virtual environment, using VR HMD and hand-held controllers.
Graphics card	NVIDIA	GeForce RTX 3090 10496 NVIDIA CUDA Cores 1.70 GHz Boost Clock   24 GB Memory Size GDDR6X Memory Type	One of the most powerful graphics card on the mainstream market.
Operating system (OS)	Microsoft	Windows XP	An operating system (OS) developed and exclusively distributed by Microsoft Corporation
Replica control panel	THRUSTMASTER	2960720 2971004 2962072 2960748 2960769	U.S. Air Force A-10C attack aircraft HOTAS
Replica joystick	THRUSTMASTER	2960720	U.S. Air Force A-10C attack aircraft HOTAS
Replica pedal	THRUSTMASTER		TPR pendular rudder
Replica throttle	THRUSTMASTER		U.S. Air Force A-10C attack aircraft HOTAS
Screen connected to PC	Redmi	RMMNT27NF, 27-inch, 1920 X 1080 resolution ratio	Screen allows the experimenter to simultaneously view what is happening in the VR HMD
Screen recording software	OBS Project	OBS Studio Version 28.0	A free and open source software for video recording and live streaming
Statistical power analysis software	Open-Source	G*power Version 3.1.9.6	A free and user-friendly tool for estimating statistical power and sample size.
Statistical software	IBM	SPSS Version 24.0	A powerful statistical software platform
Versatile statistics tool	GraphPad Software	GraphPad Prism Version 9.4.0	A versatile statistics tool purpose-built for scientists-not statisticians
VR app store	HTC Corporation	VIVE Software 2.0.17.6 / 2.1.17.6	An app store for virtual reality where customers can explore, create, connect, and experience the content they love and need.
VR head-mounted display (HMD)	HTC Corporation	VIVE Pro Eye	A VR headset with precision eye tracking
VR software	Steam	Steam VR Version 1.23	A tool for experiencing VR content on the hardware