Remote Towers: Videopanorama Frame Rate Requirements Derived from Visual Discrimination of Deceleration during Simulated Aircraft Landing

In order to determine the required visual frame rate (FR) for minimizing prediction errors with out-the-window video displays at remote/virtual airport towers, thirteen active air traffic controllers viewed high dynamic fidelity simulations of landing aircraft and decided whether aircraft would stop as if to be able to make a turnoff or whether a runway excursion would be expected. The viewing conditions and simulation dynamics replicated visual rates and environments of transport aircraft landing at small commercial airports. The required frame rate was estimated from the FR-extrapolation of event probabilities conditional on predictions (stop, no-stop), and from a model fit to the perceptual discriminability A (average area under all proper ROC-curves) as dependent on FR. Decision errors are biased towards preference of overshoot and appear due to illusionary increase in speed at low frames rates. Both extrapolations yield a framerate requirement FRmin of 35 < FRmin < 40 Hz which is compared with published results [12] on shooter game scores. Definitive recommendations require further experiments with FR > 30 Hz.