Head Mounted Wind

Within the context of tele-presence and immersion for piloting light aircraft, knowledge about the surrounding wind offers useful information for piloting purposes. Rendering wind in virtual simulation or telepresence application has been used still the early sixties [1] to enhance immersion. However since then it has been rather limited to use a fan in front of the user to produce an illusion of speed. This paper presents the development of a new haptic device generating wind around the user head. The system is based on an embedded system driving 8 fan actuators regularly distributed around a Head Mounted Display (HMD). In order to validate the added value of the device in the context of tele-operation, an application has been developed around a flight simulator where wind direction and forces are passed to the user via our system. Feedback from the different users of the applications shows improvements of the immersion inside the simulation. It also gives reliable information about the wind direction and forces using the most natural cues.