Display techniques

Abstract

This paper sets out to review current sonar information displayc and to indicate how technological advances over the past decade lead to the concept of a common information display console. To appreciate the problems involved a brief insight into the nature of the information to be displayed in shipborne systems is given,from which is derived a summary table of the basic display parameter requirements. It is shown that the wide variety of data types required to be displayed may be reduced to a small family of display categories, leading to the conclusion that it should be possible to implement a display system which is sufficiently flexible to be reconfigured dynamically to any category. An additional requirement for sonar displays is that the operator should be able to interact effectively with the system via the display. Accordingly a discussion is included of current interactive devices together with their advantages and disadvantages. To examine some of the problems of sonar information display experimental system which is procured in 1975 by AUWE and the salient features of this system are briefly outlined. Much of the work with this system has been on the problems associated with formatting of the sonar data for display and, by way of illustration, some of these iormats are presented, together with their potential benefits and problems. Although much valuable experience has already been gained, a number of questions remain unanswered, particularly those relating to the use and scope of modern display techniques. A new experimental facility beL~g acquired by AUWE is described. This will be used to examine the practicality of the corr~on display console approach.