This paper reports a programme of laboratory research to assess the potential of a new form of aircraft attitude indicator. The Ambient Attitude Indicator (AAI), designed to exploit the characteristics of the ambient visual system, provides a continuous source of world-stabilized orientation information to the pilot's ambient visual system. In laboratory experiments, the first of which is reported here, the effects of peripheral visual cues on subjects' control of continuous self-stabilization in roll are assessed. Subjects, seated on a roll turntable, were required to null a continuous quasi-random forcing function using a velocity-control joystick. Their objective was to maintain a stable upright orientation. Three visual conditions were studied: no visual cues, world-stabilized peripheral visual cues, and turntable-stabilized peripheral visual cues. Significant effects of visual condition were found for measures of joystick RMS displacement, turntable RMS error, and frequency of changes of direction of the turntable. World-stabilized conditions resulted in the highest joystick RMS displacement, the lowest turntable RMS error, and the highest frequency of changes of direction of the turntable. A linear transfer function, with autoregressive noise process to represent the remnant, was fitted to the data using maximum likelihood estimation. Details of subjects' frequency response are presented and the effects of practice on these measures are also considered.
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