Upon completion of our Air Force SBIR Phase I and Phase II, contracts, the Air Force will have the necessary software and whole-hand feedback hardware for unprecedented simulation of haptic interaction between hands and control devices, paying back in multiples the Air Force's financial investment in the contracts. With the proposed high-fidelity control-panel simulator, the Air Force will be able to remotely train pilots, flight engineers and control-tower-operations personnel all over the world on the latest control panels and controls, with nothing more that a download of updated control-panel simulation software. Additionally, Air Force researchers will be able to quickly and efficiently test new control-panel layouts and flight-control paradigms, evaluating them for effectiveness and ergonomics. The aerospace-controls-toolkit (ACT) software technology to be developed under this SBIR provides significant comercial potential wherever humans use their hands to interact with control mechanisms. Such applications include commercial aircaft and control-tower simulators, automative simulators, processing-plant simulators, and many more. Importantly, development of the aerospace-controls-toolkit technology lays a strong groundwork for creation of a general hand-based simulator, where arbitrary graphical objects can be manipulated. Such a generic hand-based simulator is the panacea of virtual reality and would have tremendous commercial potential in numerous industries
