I am attending the campfire in place of Dr. Helen Dudfield (AD, Cockpit System Engineering and Integration, Air Systems, Defence Evaluation and Research Agency). Helen and I have been working on a number of different projects together, mainly investigating the benefits and aiding the design of different display types (mainly in military environments), such as large screen (or panoramic) displays for command and control teams.

My background has mainly been focussed around cognitive psychology. I have a BSc in Applied Psychology and I am nearing the end of a taught MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience. I have two and a half years experience working for the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency; firstly in Air Systems, in the Human Factors group, now for the Centre for Human Sciences. The Centre for Human Sciences is a well-established group with a wide range of experience and expertise. The centre's capabilities include engineering and system psychology, and this is the main focus of my work. Particular interests include neuroscience, perception, vision, aircraft and other military displays, visualisation, attention, eye-movements and eye-tracking.

I am attending the campfire to the benefit of two current projects. The first project is funded by MoD Corporate Research Programme Technology Group 5: Human Sciences and Synthetic Environments: Campaign Combat Information Management For Future Command (CCIMFC). The second is an EC 5th Framework project - Visual INTeraction and Human Effectiveness in the Cockpit, Part II (VINTHEC II).

The aim of CCIMFC is to develop a novel visualisation tool for command teams. Command and control operations depend heavily on the interpretation, processing and conveying of large amounts of data. This often results in command personnel becoming overloaded with information. Currently, no adequate visualisation tool exists to support command teams in situation assessment and facilitate their selection of appropriate courses of action. This MoD funded research is being conducted in response to this identified gap between the existing technology and the human operator. The problem is, how to design the best display to achieve this aim. It seems logical that a key factor in designing optimal displays must be consideration of how the brain processes information. On this basis, the project started by conducting literature reviews on the visual system. The objective here was that if we can understand the human visual system we should be able to design displays to be most appropriate for it. However, the gulf between research into visual systems and display design appears to be large, and one that applied designers often struggle with. By attending the campfire, I am hoping that we can discuss how attempts may be made to integrate the two, how research as diverse as single cell recording can be applied directly to real-world problems and how we can successfully build collaborations between neuropsychology and applied design. I believe this to be a logical way to advance further with display design.

VINTHEC aims to provide an objective means of assessing shared situational awareness, in the cockpit or in flight simulators, and to assess eye-point-of-gaze (EPOG) measurements in these settings. Another aim is to find new and better ways to analyse and present the data recorded, especially with respect to EPOG data and data fusion. The immediate problems faced by this objective are:

• How do we approach the measurement of shared data (i.e. two pilots simultaneously, in real time)?
• How should the data be collected and analysed?
• What is the optimal way to display the data?
• What do eye movements really tell us about situational awareness?