C-17 DUST HUD DU Chassis

Head Up Display Assembly

The US Department of Defense ran a Dual Use Science and Technology (DUST) programme which allowed the DoD and a Contractor to establish work that benefits both parties. A guiding principle is for the DoD was to try to leverage technological advances in the commercial sector to help meet future defence requirements. In 2005 the Company participated in a joint Boeing Phantom Works, AFRL (DUST) programme to evaluate fused sensor and synthetic imagery on helmet-mounted (HMD), HUD and HDD displays. The system installed on the C-17 included three FLIR sensors providing a 192° wide field of view. Using a BAE Systems head-tracked, visor-projected HMD, the pilot was able to look anywhere within the fused EVS/SVS image, including down "through" the instrument panel and an aft looking IR image of the cargo hold. A BAE developed digital light engine HUD displayed images processed at high speeds using field-programmable gate arrays. This reduced latency in images, which were displayed as close as is feasible to the ideal "single timeframe" speed of 16.6 milliseconds.’ BAE Systems supplied a standard C-17 Head Up Display modified with a Digital Light Engine using a digital micromirror device (DMD) from Texas Instruments (TI DLP®) and laser illumination. This aspect of the project helped in the development of a solid state replacement for the CRT which was becoming difficult to source and lacking in resolution for the modern sensors.
The Texas instruments device is described in TI DLP description