Brace touch: A dependable, turbulence-tolerant, multi-touch interaction technique for interactive cockpits

Abstract

A cockpit (also called a flight deck) is an interactive environment of an aircraft that enables both pilot and first officer to monitor and control the aircraft systems. Allowing the crew to control aircraft systems through display units by using a keyboard and cursor control unit is one of the main features in the new generation of cockpits based on the ARINC 661 standard. Aircraft manufacturers are now investigating the deployment of touch interactions in future cockpits and ARINC 661 standard (supplement 7) extends it for that purpose. While touch interactions have demonstrated benefits in terms of performance (from the user point of view), their dependability is an important issue that has not been addressed so far. This paper proposes an interaction technique for touch devices called Brace Touch that aims at increasing the dependability of touch interactions by providing solutions to address development, natural and operation faults.