In the event you assumed that army coaching simulators have been solely made potential with the arrival of 3D graphics and digital actuality, Tom Scott is right here to show you incorrect as he check drives an enchanting ‘70s-era tank simulator that depends on a tiny digital camera exploring an in depth mannequin of a miniature European countryside.
Fashionable simulators, whether or not they recreate the expertise of driving a beastly car or flying an plane, use a mix of real-time laptop graphics and full-size cockpit recreations that transfer and shake and vibrate in excellent sync with what a pilot or driver is seeing on a display screen or inside a digital actuality headset. The expertise is extremely convincing, and an efficient option to give a trainee a whole bunch of hours of expertise with a car with out placing them, or the actual factor, in danger.
Army gear has at all times been leading edge and really costly, so simulators have lengthy been a helpful coaching device, however earlier than computer systems have been highly effective sufficient to generate convincing 3D graphics, constructing a convincing simulator required a wholly totally different strategy, as Tom Scott found whereas visiting the Swiss Army Museum in Switzerland.
Trainees (or vacationers, today) climb right into a recreation of a tank cockpit, that includes all of the controls you’d discover in the actual factor, which sits atop a motorized base that may transfer the cockpit round in all instructions. When searching the tiny entrance window of the tank, the motive force doesn’t see the actual world, however a display screen displaying a reside video feed from a tiny digital camera that explores a close-by miniature recreation of the rolling countryside, with the digital camera’s actions managed by the tank cockpit.
The simulator is a marvel of brute drive engineering, nevertheless it’s the small issues that assist actually promote the impact that the individual within the tank cockpit is basically in management and driving a full-size car. The shifting digital camera is housed inside a blue shroud that strikes together with it in order that what’s seen over the horizon within the video feed at all times seems to be like blue sky. And beneath the tiny digital camera is a small pivoting foot that slides alongside the sleek roadways within the miniature mannequin, however pivots up and down when traversing rougher terrain, like logs, with these motions being translated to the tank’s cockpit in real-time.
It took the museum over two years to rebuild the retired tank simulator and get it working once more, and whereas it nonetheless makes use of the unique video gear, together with the tiny digital camera that was in all probability a marvel of engineering again within the ‘70s, its laptop management system needed to be utterly changed with, unbelievably, a $35 Raspberry Pi.
