"You could move your head and look for traffic just as though you were scanning for traffic from a seat in the aircraft. Except Aero Glass would be even better, because you could augment that reality with overlays to highlight and indicate trend vectors to any air traffic in the area with tail numbers, distances, relative speeds, any parameters that would be useful."- T. Butterfield
Question: Why are aircraft without a pilot onboard restricted from flying in normal U.S. Airspace for commercial purposes? The answer lies in the ability to avoid a collision with an oncoming aircraft. There is a requirement in the FARs (14 CFR 91.113) that requires pilots to see-and-avoid oncoming aircraft based on the right-of-way rules in that regulation. An Unmanned, or remotely piloted, aircraft has the potential to have a camera fail, hit a bird, a big June bug, or simply miss traffic because most cameras have a significantly smaller field of view than the human eye. Because of that discrepancy, the FAA requires any UAS operation to have a system of risk mitigation to prevent mid-air collisions. This becomes even more dicey if the aircraft goes into a lost-link mode.
There are many large projects around the world to create traffic management systems that will assist UAS in collision avoidance. Even systems that will automate maneuvering to avoid collisions during any mode of flight. (Link to article on UAS Traffic Management Systems)
In any aircraft, the traffic pattern is the most common critical phase of flight. According to a study by MIT, this is where 59% of mid-air collisions occur. Using a joystick to move a camera around in a relatively small field of view can make finding oncoming traffic far more difficult than it could be.
Imagine if your UAS had a system like Aero Glass. What if those glasses were not only coordinated with your navigation and traffic management systems (ADS-B, TCAS, TIS-B, Radar), but also linked via inertial sensors in the glasses to the gimbaled payload on your aircraft. You could move your head and look for traffic just as though you were scanning for traffic from a seat in the aircraft. Except Aero Glass would be even better, because you could augment that reality with overlays to highlight and indicate trend vectors to any air traffic in the area with tail numbers, distances, relative speeds, any parameters that would be useful.
https://vimeo.com/101826751