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This paper describes the Virtual Environment Integration Laboratory (VEIL) of the Royal Aerospace Establishment (RAE). The VEIL programme is intended to provoke appropriate technological developments by exploring the human requirements of operating within a virtual cockpit whilst conducting demanding missions. Under construction is a light-weight binocular, colour helmet-mounted display with a wide field of view, driven by a versatile parallelarchitecture computer graphic system which accommodates simulated sensor images from a camera and terrain model. Prototypes of suitable display formats will be developed using a bench-mounted stereoscopic viewing rig which will also facilitate investigation of critical psychophysical issues. The complete VEIL hardware will integrate eye and head position sensors, three dimensional sound, direct voice input, and tactile sensors with the binocular display system. When allied to the ground-attack, helicopter and air-combat simulator facilities of Mission Management Department, it will enable the practicality of operating virtual cockpit systems in a wide variety of missions and tasks to be addressed.

RCA's Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) has implemented an integrated system which permits control of high level tasks in a robotics environment through voice input in the form of natural language syntax. The paper to be presented will outline the architecture used to integrate voice recognition and synthesis hardware and natural language and intelligent reasoning software with a supervisory processor that controls robotic and vision operations in the robotic testbed. The application is intended to give the human operator of a Puma 782 industrial robot the ability to combine joystick teleoperation with voice input in order to provide a flexible man-machine interface in a hands-busy environment. The system is designed to give the operator a speech interface which is unobtrusive and undemanding in terms of predetermined syntax requirements. The voice recognizer accepts continuous speech and the natural language processor accepts full and partial sentence fragments and can perform a fair amount of disambiguation and context analysis. Output to the operator comes via the parallel channel of speech synthesis so that the operator does not have to consult the computer's CRT for messages. The messages are generated from the software and offer warnings about unacceptable situations, confirmations of actions completed, and feedback of system data.

This is a design paper describing a 4 dimensional processing and display system for cardiovascular research. A 4 dimensional image in this paper refers to a time (or other) series of 3 dimensional images. The system consists of components to develop, test and run programs and to manipulate and store multidimensional digital images. A 4 dimensional display is used to study raw and processed data. The display uses binocular stereo to generate a 3 dimensional image and bulk memory to store multiple stereo pairs for the fourth dimension. Voice input and output will be used to communicate with the system. A binocular infrared eye tracker will be used as a multidimensional cursor to interact with the data. Software development areas are summarized. The current state of the project is presented at the end of the paper. An up to date summary of progress will be presented at the conference.© (1983) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.