Prototyping Urban Environments Towards Extended Reality-Based Human Machine Interfaces for Advanced Air Mobility and Urban Air Mobility

Recently, most research efforts and resourced in Aeronautics are devoted to the development of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) technologies. This term refers to all air mobility services based on autonomy and electrification of air systems and their infrastructure and when conducted in urban contexts is known as Urban Air Mobility (UAM). However, the integration of these systems and what is their environmental, social and economic impact is still unknown and such ignorance may decelerate its effective implementation and thus enjoyment of the benefits. In this context, visualization and interaction technologies such as Extended Reality Technologies (XR) can be leveraged as enabling technologies aiding in the deployment of AAM and UAM. In this paper, we present an overview of methodologies for designing human-machine interfaces in aeronautics and the results of a study of tools and methods for prototyping virtual urban environments for XR-UAM applications. Moreover, as a result of implementing the discussed tools, a study case is proposed.