Regional Aircraft Interiors Evaluation in a Real Time Ray-Traced Immersive Virtual Environment

This paper describes the Immersive VR Interiors Simulator developed by the VR Lab @ CIRA, the Italian Aerospace Research Centre, through which, leveraging the immersive approach and the first-person interaction, it was possible to carry out reachability, habitability and comfort tests of a new regional aircraft prototype. More than one seats configuration was loaded in the app preparation phase in order to setup a switch logic among them. In the same way, by simply pressing the buttons on his/her handheld controller, users could change internal and external lights conditions. The experimental activity was focused to the seating zone of the passengers' cabin. Overall cabin assessment, with the user standing in the cabin (including navigation, seat row ingress/egress and embarkment/disembarkment) and with the user in a seating position (PSU and try table reachability and usability tests) were carried out in order to improve and optimize the features of the aircraft interiors. The protocol followed by CIRA for the human-in-the-loop subjective assessment of innovative design of regional aircraft interiors included two user questionnaires: the first one specific for the purposes of the core evaluation, the second one aiming at validating the user acceptance of VR, of the immersive approach, and of the specific VR application itself. In this paper, the results of a subjective test campaign made up of #24 testing subjects are presented.