Design and implementation of eye tracking application for generation of augmented reality content on spatial see through display of remote and virtual control tower (RVT)

Airports are a fundamental node in the aviation system. The growth of this sector undergoes the evolution of the airports procedures and infrastructures. Air traffic control is considered to be one of the most important activity performed in an airport. This often involves numerous personnel, construction and maintenance costs etc. With the ongoing digitalisation process in various fields, the concept of remote and virtual control towers (RVT) has emerged owing to the innovation in this field. Technologies such as augmented reality (AR) have successfully paved their smooth way to bring in improvements to an RVT. The current work aims to enhance and improve the controller work in an RVT exploiting the adaption of virtual reality and AR systems. In particular, this concept is under investigation within the EU funded SESAR project: RETINA (Resilient Synthetic Vision for Advanced Control Tower Air Navigation Service Provision) and DTT (Digital Technologies for Tower). AR content generation by virtue of various display technologies are studied and, Optical Spatial See-through displays (O SSTDs) have been considered for its own advantages in developing this application. One of the necessary requirements of AR in this configuration is identified as the tracking of the operator’s point of view (eye-tracking), to provide virtual content consistent with its real position. Thus, this paper elaborates the design of specific eye-tracking system using Microsoft Kinect V2 for the virtual control tower application. The need to have binocular vision to use AR content is assessed and the interface has been tested with few subjects to evaluate the precision of the measurements detected through the proposed solution.