Psychological effects of work with a helmet-mounted display

An experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of an helmet-mounted display (HMD) compared with an hand-held display (HHD) on the operator's behavior and experience. Ground vehicles and helicopters had to be detected in a computer simulation of a traffic scenario in an artificial city. The target objects were presented on HMD or HHD before appearing in the traffic scenario. Beside the performance variables detection time and detection frequency, questionnaire variables of workload and of simulator sickness have been determined by the Belastungsverlaufstest (BLV) and the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ). 12 subjects participated twice in the experiment with a trial duration of 140 minutes. The performance data show a consistent trend towards higher detection times and lower hit rates with the HMD. Most of the subscales of the BLV and SSQ show significantly higher scores for HMD compared with HHD.