Spatial awareness in synthetic vision systems: using spatial and temporal judgments to evaluate texture and field of view.

Objective: This work introduced judgment-based measures of spatial awareness and used them to evaluate terrain textures and fields of view (FOVs) in synthetic vision system (SVS) displays.

Background: SVSs are cockpit technologies that depict computer-generated views of terrain surrounding an aircraft. In the assessment of textures and FOVs for SVSs, no studies have directly measured the three levels of spatial awareness with respect to terrain: identification of terrain, its relative spatial location, and its relative temporal location.