Human Systems Integration Division @ NASA Ames

Surprisingly little consistent guidance directly addressing multimodal displays is currently available in the form ofstandards and guidelines. These vary considerably in terms oftheir specific focus and level of abstraction. Guidelines:

• May be essentially unimodal, addressing the properties and preferable uses of the individual sensory channels.
• May focus on a very specific type of display for a very specific task such as multimodal warning signals for driver-vehicle interfaces.

• Are high-level design principles that can apply independent of modality, such as complementarity, consistency, and redundancy of information presentation either within or across sensory channels.

• May be more general guidelines concerned with the effective combination and integration of sensory channels, but they are primarily based on research using bimodal information and few directly address trimodal (or beyond) information integration.

• NASA 3001 standards for crew interfaces are either very high level or very specific. HIDH handbook recommendations/guidelines also tend to be high level. Neither specifically address multimodal displays.