ABSTRACT
This paper describes two experiments undertaken to explore virtual cockpit concepts. The first aimed to evaluate the feedback requirements to allow virtual controls to be used as a successful alternative to conventional controls; the second aimed to evaluate possible virtual cursor designs and assess whether the type of cursor used affects task performance. In both experiments a digit-input task was used to assess performance. Experiment one showed that simultaneous visual and tactile feedback enabled better performance than either visual or tactile feedback alone or no-feedback. The second experiment indicated that there were no significant differences in performance between the four cursor designs that were compared. It is therefore likely that the design of the cursor used in manual virtual control tasks does not exert a major influence on performance.
