A Mixed Reality Setup for Prototyping Holographic Cockpit Instruments

This paper discusses a possible solution to allow rapid prototyping of augmented reality content for evaluating user assistance systems. Building upon current approaches from the automotive context, it presents options to transfer these to the aerospace context, focusing on upcoming electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft. By showing issues of using optical-see-through glasses inside a moving simulator, a solution for using video-see-through head-mounted displays instead is presented. As a solution, a modular system setup that can handle different rendering sources to create contact-analog augmentations on top of a virtual environment while using video-see-through capabilities to interact with the physical cockpit environment is presented. The main contribution is a process to avoid manual calibration between the different coordinate systems across the involved applications. To further discuss holographic content for vehicle-based augmentations, a first taxonomy is discussed on locating augmentations to prototype such concepts with the presented Mixed-Reality-Simulator.