“MIT professor Missy Cummings used to fly F/A-18 Hornet fighters for the Navy. ‘I spent whole time complaining — who was the moron who designed this thing?’ she recalled. If you’ve ever peeked inside a fighter cockpit, you’ll understand her gripe. Dials, displays and controls pack every nook and cranny. It’s the farthest thing from ergonomic,” David Axe reports for Wired.

“The problem stuck with Cummings, after she got out of the Navy,” Axe reports. “She went on to get a Ph.D. in ‘cognitive systems engineering’ before getting hired at MIT, where she heads the Humans and Automation Lab, or HAL. ‘There’s a joke in the name,’ she pointed out.”

Axe reports, “Her crew of 30 grad students and undergrads is chasing a number of new ideas and technologies, all aimed at easing the sometimes unwieldy interactions between machines and their human masters. As an example, she refers to the complex, suitcase-sized controller that soldiers must haul around to control hand-thrown Raven unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. Cummings wants something simpler. And what could be simpler than an iPhone?”


Direct link to video via YouTube here.

More in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "ChrisJ" for the heads up.]