ABSTRACT
The papers in the following section generally deal with the problems of human operators who interact with complex machinery or work in unfamiliar, counter-intuitive, strange and sometimes hostile environments. It deals with those characteristics of the human visual and motor systems which allow us to perceive and compose spatial maps of our environment on one hand, and guide visuomotor behavior on the other hand. It investigates the visual system in terms of environments, unnatural to the human, such as virtual environments for telepresence, or head-mounted displays, and discusses the human ability to adapt to mismatches in the visuomotor system. Such mismatches might occur in remote manipulation under conditions in which, due to time delays, system noise or distortions, a stable or normal correlation between the motion of the hand and of the visual image is lacking. Finally, the chapter discusses how the various sensory inputs interact in the human spatial orientation process, how sensory conflict can result in motion sickness, how orientation interacts with our perception of form, and how the visual ocular reflex can be voluntarily counteracted.
