The i-VISION project aims at supporting human factors design and validation activities in aircraft cockpits, during the early phases of the product life-cycle through knowledge-based immersive virtual reality technologies. i-VISION, through a unique combination of research in the areas of human factors, semantics and virtual design, will enable designers and engineers to visualize, manipulate and interact with the digital mock up in an intelligent manner allowing for decisions to be taken very early in the design process and thus helping to reduce costly errors.

The i-VISION project has three distinct and complementary scientific and technological objectives, briefly described as follows:

• Human-Cockpit Operations Analysis. Advanced human factors methods for analysing the human procedures and tasks during various phases and operating conditions in a VR-based aircraft cockpit.
• Semantic Virtual Cockpit. Semantic technologies will be used to enrich the geometric datasets with semantic annotations. This way intelligence and knowledge of procedures and cockpit concepts is added to the VR-based simulation of cockpit operations enabling engineers and human factors experts to assess a virtual aircraft cockpit in a time and cost-effective way.
• Virtual Cockpit Design Environment. An advanced VR environment will serve as a reusable and low-cost simulation test-bed for experimenting with various configurations and set-ups of virtual cockpits. It will allow the human-centred assessment of future cockpit architectures.

The i-VISION project involves 7 partners from 5 EU countries. The apparent multi-nationality assures a specification framework addressing in a representative way European-wide technology requirements, but it also widely improves the potential for an efficient Europe-wide dissemination of the project outputs. The i-VISION project is endorsed by the European Aeronautics Science Network.