Agreed. The simulator part was very interesting. Here's some questions so you can continue the conversation with your experience!
From being quite a sceptic, I am now converted to something else……… The VR goggles were amazingly good and with a small amount of additional sensory information could give you a very real feeling of being in a glider… noise from the airframe, a bit of wind, the smell of nappies, sweat and old men etc. However this opens a whole new can of worms. On the one hand, you have the ability to create a first class simulator for under $1500 which for realism, blows full cockpit and screen type simulators into history. On the other hand, there does not appear to be much software which can be used with VR does there? I had another look at both Silent Wings and Condor and neither had much in the way of updates since perhaps 2008. There was a lot of traffic on their fora about lack of updates and the need for VR support with no concrete evidence that any new software would be forthcoming. So does any other flight sim software work? If you are only training things like circuits, spins and so on, does the software need to be glider specific with accurate weather modelling, or can it be just basic flight simulator software? And what are you training? Ab initio? Emergencies? Instructor training? From a software developer's perspective, putting money into gliding software is difficult at a return of under $100 a head and if the software is used in a club simulator, then the overall returns are just not there unless you can charge a lot more per copy, charge an annual rental or have some federal or international body pay for it. Might the availability of software limit all types of gliding simulators in the future? On the hardware side, having been involved with commercial systems which require projectors to run with software, you're chasing your tail because the manufacturers update everything every 5 minutes so lenses, mounts, bulbs etc. are made obsolete every 18 months or so. Difficult for a commercial product where you have to tell your customer that their gear is obsolete in 3-4 years and poison in a club scenario where members want a bit more bang for their buck. Add to that the fact that the realism of a standard resolution projector based sim is nowhere near adequate for some purposes like landing and possibly take off and that the cost of building, housing and maintaining the hardware of the simulator and you wonder if projector and screen based systems have any future at all except for showing people where to put their hands on knobs. For my money, the VR approach is really interesting, provided you can get software and that may be the limiting factor, based on the competing needs of of sim users. D _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list Aus-soaring@lists.base64.com.au http://lists.base64.com.au/listinfo/aus-soaring
