Ergonomic evaluation and design of the VDT system for the hermetic cockpit

This paper presents a closed-loop design method which has been utilized to evaluate and design the Visual Display Terminal (VDT) system of the hermetic cockpit. Our evaluation steps include: 1) we propose five ergonomic factors of the VDT system, i.e., the Observation Distance (OD), the Illumination Level (IL), the Observation Angle (OA), the Size of the Observation Target (SOT), and the Background Contrast (BC) to evaluate the ergonomic performance of it. 2) We evaluate the importance level of these factors above by an orthogonal experiment method. 3) We use the result of the orthogonal experiment to improve the design of the VDT system. 4) We utilize an eye-hand harmony experiment (an exterior experiment, different to the evaluation experiment in step 2)) to give a feedback and assess the validity of the improvement effect of the VDT system. Experiment results show that the important order of the effect factors in our experiment condition is: the OD, the IL, the SOT, the BC and the OA; and we also find that by using the evaluation result above, we can improve the working efficiency effectively by the test of the eye-hand harmony experiment.