Helmet-Mounted Displays: - USAARL - The - U.S. Army

Introductory Overview 7
The trend for increasing reliance on HMDs in aviation, as well as in
other sectors of the Army, will continue. The U.S. Army Night Vision and
Electronic Sensor Directorate (NVESD), Fort Belvior, Virginia, is
developing an HMD under the Advanced Helicopter Pilotage (AHP)
program (Perconti,1997). The AHP HMD is biocular, providing the same
imagery to each eye. Its two optical channels each provide a 40º monocular
circular FOV. When mounted on a helmet, the system provides a 30º (V)
x 50º (H) total FOV with a 30º binocular overlap region.
The United States and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland have collaborated on the Covert Night/Day Operations for
Rotorcraft (CONDOR) program. CONDOR is a research platform for
demonstrating advanced visionics concepts and includes a variable FOV
HMD based on high resolution miniature active matrix liquid crystal
displays (AMLCDs) (Kanahele and Buckanin, 1996).
The U.S. Army and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) have funded a number of additional aviation HMD concepts
based on FP technologies (Girolamo, Rash, and Gilroy, 1997). These
include the Miniature Flat Panel for Aviation (MFP/A) program which has
as its goal the investigation of using miniature FP technology displays in
the development of an HMD for use in rotary-wing aircraft and the Aircrew
Integrated Helmet System (AIHS) Comanche Compatibility program which
has as its goal the development of an HMD design using the Helmet Gear
Unit No. 56/P (HGU-56/P) flight helmet as the platform. A partial
summary of current rotary-wing HMD programs (both fielded and under
development) by Belt et al. (1997) is provided in Table 1.1. An excellent
attempt to develop a taxonomy and philosophy of HMD systems has been
made by Brindle, Marano-Goyco, and Tihansky (1995).
This book is intended to serve as both a checklist and a guide for
designers of such future integrated helmet and display systems for rotarywing
aircraft. In this book: a) salient performance parameters of such
systems are identified; b) recommendations for values of these parameters
are suggested, based on past research and the opinions of subject matter
experts; c) an analysis of potential health and safety hazards is provided;
d) a human factors engineering assessment (HFEA) is provided; and e)
lessons learned from previously fielded U.S. Army HMD systems are
summarized. However, this book is not a cookbook for building an
integrated helmet and display system. The design of such a system is
strongly dependent on its purpose, user requirements, and the environment
within which it is intended to operate.