Have you ever been flying around in your private plane and the control tower or approach control has sent you on a vector or asked you to do something, which made no sense at all? But of course you did it anyway, because they are in charge right? You might have thought to yourself; Is this guy for real? Is this guy in some kind of dreamland, asleep up there? Well in the future such questions may not be too far off actually. For instance your air traffic control tower professional maybe in augmented reality, sitting in a room with no windows looking at your aircraft on a TV screen or video monitor. A picture of a Beechcraft, not an image of your exact plane. Now a days the air traffic controlers train in the VR, Virtual Reality World. Generally these controllers have many things going on at once which you cannot possibly know and what looks like a pipe dream or wishful thinking on their part is part of a larger plan. Did you know that air traffic professionals are now training in virtual reality simulators hooked up to pilots in aircraft simulators and the whole thing does not even exist? Talk about working in a dream world. Now then lets discuss another subject; Virtual Reality Control Towers. This would be good so that Control Tower operators would not discuss the sightings of UFOs, etc as the reports from pilots come in. But besides that these VR Control towers right now are only simulators for training control tower operators, for instance you can have the busiest day at Laguardia, O'Hare, LAX or even the EAA show is Oshkosh just to give you a challenge. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0005471B-3E53-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21 Isn't this too cool. And just think once it gets really good, the operators can go on strike and stay there; although I should not say that since my Grandfather use to run the FAA Control Tower at Fresno International. This link shows you some cool Videos; http://ffc.arc.nasa.gov/gallery/vr_panoramas/ You can also stay up on this information by subscribing the newsletter; http://ffc.arc.nasa.gov/newsroom/newsletter/ It will not be long now before many aircraft are flying themselves and the air traffic control personal in the control towers do not even have windows to look outside, as the whole thing will be in a video game like augmented reality which will be recorded for later use in virtual reality training of new controllers in air traffic control simulators. All this is happening right now. Sounds like the Matrix; well, kind of, it is all about safety. Think about this and the virtual reality simulators used in aviation. |
