Flight 'Sim' in the 60s...

[kotor633]

 

[Beirut]

Cool!

 

I still remember making space ships out of big cardboard boxes back in the late 60s. If we got a fridge or stove delivered, that box immediately had windows cut in it and dial and switches drawn all over the inside. 

 

Thank god I didn't grow up with an iPhone. 

[Cunctator]

 

[KenaiPhoenix]

Amazing

 

I dont want to even think what people are going to think about our current sims in 100 years.

 

"like... screen on your face?... ALL THE TIME?!"

[Dragon1-1]

I rather suspect they'll laugh at our clunky and heavy VR headsets, hooked by cable to a furnace with a USB ports. A screen on your face is basically the most space-efficient way to do a flight sim, though I suppose some sort of holographic display, or an implant talking directly to an optic nerve (unlikely to ever be the primary interface option) could give it a run for its money.

[Aapje]

People are working on a headset that shoots (very low power) lasers straight into your eyes, which in theory is the most efficient and least intrusive way to do it without surgery, if you can miniaturize the lasers and the related tech. However, it requires way more advanced tech than the relatively simple technology of shoving a screen in front of your face and it is thus very far from ready for the market.

For example, current eye tracking is rather mediocre and doesn't track the retina, which is the part of the eye that you actually look with, but the laser solution requires much more accuracy than foveated rendering, where you can just render a larger part of the screen to account for inaccuracies in tracking the retina, and slow performance compared to how fast the eye can move.

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

On 1/20/2025 at 11:02 AM, KenaiPhoenix said:

Amazing

 

I dont want to even think what people are going to think about our current sims in 100 years.

 

"like... screen on your face?... ALL THE TIME?!"

"Wow, they didn't just use their neural projector? Wait, they didn't have those!?"

[MAXsenna]

9 hours ago, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

"Wow, they didn't just use their neural projector? Wait, they didn't have those!?"

I'm already envious...  

[MAXsenna]

 

[louza]

I loved my Steve Canyon helmet. Thanks for posting this!

 

_{192.168.100.1 192.168.1.1}

Edited April 29 by louza

[Dragon1-1]

On 1/21/2025 at 8:18 PM, Aapje said:

People are working on a headset that shoots (very low power) lasers straight into your eyes, which in theory is the most efficient and least intrusive way to do it without surgery, if you can miniaturize the lasers and the related tech. However, it requires way more advanced tech than the relatively simple technology of shoving a screen in front of your face and it is thus very far from ready for the market.

For example, current eye tracking is rather mediocre and doesn't track the retina, which is the part of the eye that you actually look with, but the laser solution requires much more accuracy than foveated rendering, where you can just render a larger part of the screen to account for inaccuracies in tracking the retina, and slow performance compared to how fast the eye can move.

Retinal projection is already a thing, however it seems to me that it's going to be more of an AR solution, unlikely to displace screens completely. It's already a commercial technology, though, with Retissa viewfinder using it.

For what it's worth, to make a VR HMD you don't actually need to track the retina (which, after all, is inside the eye), you need to track the pupil. It is an interesting proposition, since unlike with the screen, you could potentially locate the emitter (and thus most of the weight) somewhere else than in front of the eyes, and use fiber optics to deliver the beam. Fiber optics don't like bending, so it'll probably still be on your head, but it could be somewhere more comfortable.

[Aapje]

27 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Retinal projection is already a thing

Yes, but the quality is not that good. For it to be at a very high level, a lot of technological advances have to be made.

27 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

For what it's worth, to make a VR HMD you don't actually need to track the retina (which, after all, is inside the eye), you need to track the pupil.

This is not as accurate as tracking the retina, also because the eye can change shape and differs per person. And you have eyelids getting in the way and such:

https://kguttag.com/2021/07/13/exclusive-eyeway-vision-part-1-foveated-laser-scanning-display/#jp-carousel-6331

[Dragon1-1]

Eyelids will get in the way no matter what (that's their job), and while the eye can change shape, shape of the pupil is directly correlated with its optical properties. Yes, it's different per person, but this only means some way of adjusting the HMD to the specific wearer is necessary. You can try tracking the retina, but it's not the only way to tackle this problem.

40 minutes ago, Aapje said:

Yes, but the quality is not that good. For it to be at a very high level, a lot of technological advances have to be made.

None of them require a major breakthrough, though. It's more of a matter of making the thing affordable for mass production, this tech is still in its early phase, and that means improvements are likely to come fairly quickly. If patent issues don't choke it off, we'll probably see it in a consumer HMD before the end of the decade.

Edited January 24 by Dragon1-1

[Aapje]

17 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

It's more of a matter of making the thing affordable for mass production, this tech is still in its early phase, and that means improvements are likely to come fairly quickly.

The quality has to be good enough for it to sell in sufficient quantity in the first place. You can't just mass-produce something that is not yet good enough, because then people won't buy it and you won't earn money to make improvements. You will go bankrupt.

[Dragon1-1]

8 hours ago, Aapje said:

You will go bankrupt.

Elon Musk: hold my beer... 

Besides, quality doesn't matter if you can compete on price, so yeah, you very much can mass produce something that you don't think is good enough, if you can make it sufficiently cheap. Of course, that tech is far from cheap, but there are several other points that it could compete on, like weight or weight distribution. Also, that viewfinder is not that far below what the early Oculus Rift versions could do, which was usable for VR. 

[Aapje]

That's not how it works. You need to be able to sell for a price above cost, otherwise you make a loss.

And making things cheaper, is actually one of the technological advances that need to happen.

[whurst1]

I Loved my Steve Canyon helmet. My father was a pilot and later I became one too, in real life.

This was my simulator back then...

 

[Dragon1-1]

On 1/26/2025 at 1:41 AM, Aapje said:

That's not how it works. You need to be able to sell for a price above cost, otherwise you make a loss.

Or, you can sell at a loss, and sell a product or service that will make up for that loss (of course, for this you do have to make the "killer app" which will be both indispensable and unusable without your hardware). Several examples of that from the tech world, as well.

Besides, mass production itself tends to bring costs down a lot. That's what I was referring to, "cheap enough to mass produce" means figuring out how to make it work with a Chinese assembly line. I assure you, consumer electronics aren't sold anywhere near cost. Electronics are typically sold at a huge markup, unless someone is trying to pull the aforementioned trick (which is why it works in first place). Economics of scale mean that once you have mass production going, you can slash the markup.

In fact, I think that laser diode arrays might one day scale better than screens do. One nice thing about retinal projection is that it doesn't necessarily need to go to the same extremes of miniaturization that screens have to in order to look good (same reason why you don't get screen door effect when you project a full HD screen to cover an entire wall). Added bulk isn't too bad, and miniaturization is what tends to drive up manufacturing costs.

Edited January 27 by Dragon1-1

[Aapje]

If you have a product design that makes you money and one that loses you money, why not just only sell the one that earns you money?

And I still fundamentally disagree that it is a good idea to put a poor product that people don't want onto the market, and then bet on losing money to sell that product in large volume, to drive down costs where you still lose tons of money, but a bit less per unit. One issue with that strategy is that a smaller loss per unit still adds up to a huge loss in total when you start mass producing. And there is no guarantee that people are willing to take your product when it is crap. 

There is this saying: "there are no bad products, only bad prices," but I think that this is very wrong, unless you are literally giving people money, and they only take a horrible product to trash it, and pocket the money. At that point you are better off taking the product directly to the landfill.

Putting bad products on the market also trashes your reputation, making people unwilling to get your product when you actually produce something good.

Mass production is simply not a panacea to magically make a product ready for the market.

Quote

and miniaturization is what tends to drive up manufacturing costs.

This is also a simplification. Chips drove down prices greatly compared to vacuum tubes. Increased miniaturization in chips was no more costly until relatively recently. Smaller products can mean less material costs and some kinds of small designs are very cheap to make.

Edited January 28 by Aapje

[Dragon1-1]

17 hours ago, Aapje said:

If you have a product design that makes you money and one that loses you money, why not just only sell the one that earns you money?

Because it might be that one would need the one that loses money to use the one that makes money? Say, sell printers at a loss and then make money on selling ink for them (real example, believe it or not). If your margin on ink is high enough, and people use it up fast enough, you'll make up for the loss on printers, but nobody will buy an ink cartridge if they don't have a printer to put it into, no? 

17 hours ago, Aapje said:

One issue with that strategy is that a smaller loss per unit still adds up to a huge loss in total when you start mass producing. And there is no guarantee that people are willing to take your product when it is crap. 

That's why you need a strategy to make them want it. You also seem to willingly ignore that I'm not talking about selling at a loss here, I'm talking selling at a small margin. Stop arguing a strawman and stick to the point. A product that is usable, but merely not as good as the competition, can still sell if you can undercut the competition on price by a big enough margin. Mass production is what enables you to sell stuff at a margin of a few cents per unit and still come out ahead. 

17 hours ago, Aapje said:

This is also a simplification. Chips drove down prices greatly compared to vacuum tubes. Increased miniaturization in chips was no more costly until relatively recently. Smaller products can mean less material costs and some kinds of small designs are very cheap to make.

Yeah, because chips were a was completely different tech from tubes. Small designs are cheaper to make, up to a point, that point being where you need to go into heavy duty nanotechnology in order to achieve densities that you want. The smaller design is, the more precise your manufacturing process has to be, and precision costs money. A chunk of silicon is cheap, a machine to make a chip out of it is not, and the denser the chip, the more expensive the machine becomes. Again, material costs in electronics are typically negligible unless you're doing something exotic.

[Aapje]

VR headsets don't use ink. You are taking a specific strategy that only works in some situations (and is often actually abusive of customers), and acting as if you can just apply it everywhere.

The rest of your comment is more of this.

Quote

Stop arguing a strawman and stick to the point.

The point where you only give examples that match your narrative, not those that go against it?

[MAXsenna]

5 minutes ago, Aapje said:

VR headsets don't use ink.

I've always wondered why certain car manufacturers didn't become oil and gas companies, so they could hand out cars for free.

I do see where @Dragon1-1 is going with this though. 

[Dragon1-1]

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

VR headsets don't use ink.

No, but you can make a mass market VR app and sell that, which is the scenario I mentioned before. Just like MS and Sony making a loss on selling consoles to make (a lot of) money on games for them. I probably should have used that as an analogy instead, the printers just came to mind first.

And yes, it's abusive of both the customers and the market at large (because the competition either follows suit or is priced out). When did that ever stop anyone? 

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

The point where you only give examples that match your narrative, not those that go against it?

No, the one where you don't outright ignore what I said to make a cheap shot at a subtly different statement. There's a clear difference between the razor and blades sales model and economics of scale, and I believe I made the distinction clear enough. Easy mass production enables both, but only one involves actually losing some money.

1 hour ago, MAXsenna said:

I've always wondered why certain car manufacturers didn't become oil and gas companies, so they could hand out cars for free.

Only because there's no easy way to restrict a car to driving on oil and gas from your company.  As a matter of fact, Rockerfeller did hand out kerosene lamps to the Chinese for exactly this reason, but that was when his company was the only game in the country.

Funnily enough, it turns out nuclear power of all things does work that way in commercial settings. They'll sell you the reactor at cost, and then bilk you for the fuel.

Edited January 28 by Dragon1-1

[MAXsenna]

Just now, Dragon1-1 said:

Only because there's no easy way to restrict a car to driving on oil and gas from your company.

Depends on the secret ingredients? Fake toners and Inkclub... 

1 minute ago, Dragon1-1 said:

As a matter of fact, Rockerfeller did hand out kerosene lamps to the Chinese for exactly this reason.

And Henry raised his workers salary so they could get his car.  

2 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Funnily enough, it turns out nuclear power of all things does work that way in commercial settings. They'll sell you the reactor at cost, and then bilk you for the fuel

Haha!!! Really? Damn, one learn something new every day!  

[Aapje]

3 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

No, but you can make a mass market VR app and sell that, which is the scenario I mentioned before.

That is actually precisely what Meta is doing with Meta Horizon. Let me check how much they made with it... Billions! That's wonderful. @Dragon1-1 is a genius!

Wait, what do you say, billions in losses? Nevermind then.

PS. The actual money is in running a store and then skimming off 30% or so of each sale. However, that requires a popular product in the first place, not just in sales, but also in use. Even with a fairly high quality product, Meta has a pretty big retention problem, where a lot of headsets get little use.