This article originally appeared in Low-fare And Regional Airlines (LARA) magazine, HMG Awerospace
by Rick Adams, FRAeS
Every few months, driving on the A1 autoroute past the headquarters of Brunner Elektronik on the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland, I’d say to my partner that “one of these days I’d like to stop and visit them.” I was vaguely familiar with what they did, largely simulator motion and control systems, and I recall a Brunner motion device married with an early-generation virtual reality headset at a training show a few years back.
This spring, I exchanged a series of messages with Mario Ackerman, Brunner’s enthusiastic sales manager, inviting me to a “not to be missed” event, to be held at the Lufthansa Training Center (LAT).
I was skeptical. There’s so much hype in the market about ‘revolutionary’ products, most of which aren’t. And Brunner volunteered no details.
Yet I was intrigued. So I hopped on a train from Geneva to Zurich Airport, where Mario retrieved me and drove to LAT, a spacious facility which houses full-flight simulators for Airbus and Boeing types, a couple of helicopter models, and assorted other training devices for pilots, cabin crew and ab initio cadets.
Brunner CEO Roger Klingler and his team, together with Finnish visual headset partner Varjo, were there to unveil a Novasim FNPT II training device for the Diamond DA42 twin-engine aircraft. This would shortly become the world’s first simulator featuring Mixed Reality (MR) to be qualified for EASA pilot training credits – through the Swiss regulator, FOCA (Federal Office of Civil Aviation).
Mixed Reality differs from Virtual Reality in that the headset uses computer-generated graphics for the representation of the world outside the cockpit, as does VR, but dual cameras to enable the trainee to view the realistic cockpit, complete with avionics displays, switches, knobs and throttles, all spatially accurate to the aircraft being replicated.
The regulatory breakthrough was made possible by Varjo’s XR-4 ‘Focal’ head-mounted display, introduced late last year. Varjo engineers leveraged the neurological concept that a person’s centre part of the eye – the ‘fovea’ – detects high-resolution imagery, whereas the ‘peripheral’ vision sees lower resolution. (Try it; look to the side without moving your head.) Scientifically, photoreceptor ‘rods’ are absent in the central visual field while ‘cones’ are less evident in the peripheral part. The brain integrates the high- and low-resolution sources for a uniform view of the world.
The first application of this principle to flight training was a Singer Link-Miles dome simulator for the UK Harrier jet when I worked there in the early 90s. The challenge in that day was limited computing power to project high-resolution computer images throughout the pilot’s visual envelope. The solution was a high-res image inset into a low-res background. To ensure the pilot always perceived high-resolution, especially for targets, an ingenious eye-tracking system relayed gaze data to a high-speed servo mirror complex. We called the system ESPRIT: Eye-Slaved Projected Raster InseT.
Virtual reality engineers have grappled for several years with a similar problem – the limited field of view and image resolution of earlier-generation HMDs.
Varjo’s elegant solution is what they call ‘foveated rendering.’ Using a pair of 20-megapixel front-mounted cameras, the current XR-4 Focal generates a 3840×3744 display at 51 pixels per degree with a 120×105-degree field of view (a 50% boost from their XR-3 model).
Varjo Chief Marketing Officer Mikko Luhtava explained that gaze-tracking enables the cameras to adjust in real-time to where the pilot is looking. When I started flying the sim, I could sense the adjustment at first (because I was trying to do so) but once immersed in the flight I was not consciously aware of any anomalies.
The Focal has already been deployed on a handful of military training programs, but those don’t require meeting precise regulations by EASA or the US FAA.
The collaboration with Brunner for the civil market was facilitated by LAT, which has an academy which uses the Diamond DA42 training aircraft. Brunner’s small team of engineers pulled off the device integration and regulatory approval which none of the traditional simulator companies has managed.
Now that both Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality flight simulation training devices have been blessed by the authorities, how will training organisations incorporate them into the curricula? And what other devices might they supplant?
Glad I finally visited Brunner to witness the birth of a new era in flight training.
PHOTO: Fanni Pajer, Chief Flight Instructor, Aeropole Flight Training, Finland, test flies the Brunner device.
READ ALSO: My exclusive first story of the NOVASIM DA42 for Flight Global – https://aviationvoices.com/swiss-unveil-worlds-1st-regulator-approved-mr-flight-simulator/