Abstract: Designing cockpits for effective placement of its displays can be accomplished more quickly and economically with an immersive virtual environment (IVE) prototyping and simulation system designed to facilitate the iterative construction and modification of crewstation prototypes during operator-in-the- loop exercises. This paper describes different characteristics of design tasks and VE systems, and a preliminary study of performance comparisons using a desktop and IVE system. The IVE design system included image generator, head-mounted display, 3D spatialized sound, spatial trackers on head and hands, instrumented gloves, synthesized speech, and simulated speech recognition systems. Expert users of a popular desktop 3D graphics application performed identical modeling and simulation tasks to modify display function and layout while using both desktop and IVE tools. The results from the pilot study indicated that even though the study participants had far less experience using the IVE (three to six hours) than the desktop applications (two to five years), they completed the tasks to criteria in less time with the IVE than when they used the desktop applications. The results showed that IVE technology could be used to create modeling and simulation tools that were easy to learn and use and that were more effective than traditional desktop tools. !22
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