ABSTRACT
The assessment of visual requirements for flight simulation is a study both sophisticated and fraught with complexity. It is commonplace for authors to declare the immensity or the richness of their subject, but vision is an old topic where much has been forged already, and where much remains to be accomplished (see Warner & Casey, 1995). Some issues in vision are deceptive in their apparent simplicity: a favorite anecdote is that Marvin Minsky once assigned the “problem of vision” as an exercise to a summer graduate school in engineering at M.I.T., fully expecting that his students would solve the problem by term’s end. Needless to say, they did not. A lot of effort can be saved by learning to think about vision clearly, by learning to gauge the scope of particular problems in vision research as no larger and no smaller than they are. “For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by” (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 232e).
