Abstract
Because crews in aerospace vehicles can be exposed to significant vibration, Adelstein, Kaiser, Beutter, McCann, and Anderson (ActaAstronautica, 2012) examined the effect of vibrating the body of observers at 12 Hz on their ability to read numeric symbols on stationary displays and found performance degradation with increasing vibration amplitude and decreasing font size. The observer's task was to read a trigram of digits and respond by pressing the right button if the digit sequence was monotonic increasing or decreasing or pressing the left button if was not. They also showed the efficacy of a display strobing countermeasure for the reading decrements. The model of Watson and Ahumada (J. Vis., 2008) for predicting letter identification in the presence of optical blur was adapted to the prediction of the effects of sinusoidal motion blur on their reading task. The model can account for the degradation caused by motion blur and the release from degradation resulting from strobing the LED backlight of the display with varying strobe duty cycles.
Supported by the NASA Space Human Factors Engineering Project.