Colour Head-Up Displays: Help or Hindrance?

Abstract

The development of colour Head-Up Display (HUD) technology has encouraged enquiry into the benefit of colour coding conventional HUD formats. Colour could be used to warn crew of danger, highlight changes in onboard systems or assist in target acquisition and combat. Specifically for this experiment colour encoded the accuracy of a subject's performance, redundant colour codes indicated the success with which a subject was maintaining a requested flight profile. Contemporary research has often found a subjective preference for colour coded displays, but little evidence of an objective advantage. The results of this experiment followed such a trend. Colour coding failed to provide any advantage in performance terms, yet it significantly reduced subjective workload, as measured by the NASA TLX (p<0.05). The initial indications are that colour coding was not optimised in this task and other techniques, e.g. recovery from unusual attitudes, and applications, e.g. target information, might be more appropriate.