Eye-Gaze-Controlled HMDS and MFD for Military Aircraft

Abstract

Eye-gaze-controlled interfaces allow the direct manipulation of a graphical user interface by looking at it. This technology has great potential in military aviation, in particular, operating different displays in situations where pilots’ hands are occupied with flying the aircraft. This paper reports studies on analyzing the accuracy of eye-gaze-controlled interfaces inside aircraft undertaking representative flying missions. We report that using eye-gaze-controlled interfaces, pilots can undertake representative pointing and selection tasks at less than two seconds on average in a transport aircraft. Further, we analyzed the accuracy of eye-gaze-tracking glasses under various G load factors and analyzed the failure modes. We observed that the accuracy of the eye-tracking glasses is less than 5 ̊of visual angle up to +3G, although less accurate at 21G and +5G. We also found that existing eye tracker fails to track eyes under higher external illumination and needs to have a larger vertical field of view than the presently available systems. We used this analysis to develop eye-gaze trackers for multi-functional displays and head-mounted display system (HMDS). We obtained significant reduction in pointing and selection times using our proposed HMDS compared to a traditional thumb-stick-based target designation system.