body accelerometer

[wolle]

Hi,

 

With the new Mustang simulation, since the aircraft is more "primitive", I find that intuitive flying (rather than instrument flying) has become more important. My feeling has been that the most important deficit of a computer simulator compared to real life is that the computer doesn't make you feel acceleration. If, in real life, the plane accellerates, we feel it in our stomach, or get jerked left and right, while on the computer we need to deduce it by looking at abstract instruments, and by then the appropriate control input may be too late. I could envision a more intuitive system, where, e.g. if you pull positive g, a bright, easily visible, bar appears at the bottom of the screen, and if we need to apply right rudder because we are skiding, a bright bar appears on the left side of the screen.

 

I hope I am making sense. Does anybody know of a software that achieves something like this in combination with DCS simulations?

[EvilBivol-1]

If you have the "Move head with G-forces" option enabled, it should help you get a sense of aircraft momentum. This can be difficult to register when your velocity is constant, but is more helpful when the velocity is changing in any direction.

Besides setting the option in the MISC. tab of the Options menu, you can toggle it on/off by pressing LWin+F1 in-game.

[Chazz_BMF]

I hope I am making sense. Does anybody know of a software that achieves something like this in combination with DCS simulations?

 

Not any software, but hardware indeed :joystick:

 

[Frogisis]

I've been wondering if something like this might not be possible with transcranial magnetic stimulation. It's certainly possible to alter a person's sense of the direction of gravity with drugs such as salvia, TCM can activate or suppress surprisingly specific things in the brain with no apparent side effects, and there's already headgear that can internally generate sensations in the wearer, so I could see something like a TrackIR headset in reverse, which would give a subtle magnetic push to your vestibular system, so you'd feel a mild sense of motion. It would correspond to the motion on screen and your own inputs through the controls, too, so I doubt you'd be any more likely to get nauseous than with any other system, or that it could be any worse for you than staring at a monitor for that same amount of time.

 

I think the biggest danger is that you might fall out of your chair unconsciously compensating for the sensation of movement, so maybe it should come with seat belts. Right now it's also the kind of thing most people would think is really creepy, but I remember 5-6 years ago reading about the first prototype gadgets that could react to brainwaves, so I can't believe it'll be too many more years before those are more reliable and ubiquitous, and some enterprising grad student builds something that works the other way. Even if it doesn't prove marketable it would still be a lot cheaper and easier to build yourself than a big hydraulic chair.

 

It'd probably suck up a lot of power, be kinda heavy, and be a real pain to calibrate at first like the brain interface devices on the market now, and I suppose powerful magnets are not exactly the kind of thing you'd want too close to your computer, but if you're willing to use a device like this you've probably already committed to some kind of simpit-like space where more sensitive equipment would be protected.

[Speed]

Why not just a set of straps that tighten and loosen in different directions? Not the feeling of acceleration, but it's tactile feedback- if you feel the straps tighten down around your legs, you're pulling a lot of Gs; if you feel nothing then you're doing zero Gs, if they are pulling up slightly, negative Gs, etc. Seems a lot easier.

[Pyroflash]

Why not just fly as real mustang? It might be easier.

 

Actually, one of the things that is important to stamp out is the use of the body's proprioceptive senses as it relates to flying (with the exception of "feeling" the rudder as it relates to acrobatics). The human body's senses in the inner ear, the buttocks, and the feet are made to maintain balance under normal conditions (1g), and once you start to impose three dimensional shifting vectors on it, it has the tendency to lie to you. For example, many aircraft accidents have been caused by the phenomenon known as the graveyard spiral. This, put simply, is the aircraft going into a steep downward spiral, even though the pilot perceives the aircraft as proceeding in a straight and level.

 

This happens for a variety of reasons:

 

1. The senses in your inner ear are comprised of six structures that we will refer to as gyros and accelerometers. These perceive motion by sensing the shifting of fluid within them, however they have a major drawback, and that is the fluid will settle down after periods of sustained motion. When this happens, motion in the opposite direction will cause the fluids to reverse in direction and a sensation of an action opposite to the real action will occur.

 

2. the senses in your buttocks that you use to feel motion can only feel g-forces and shifting motions, however they cannot understand why those forces occurred. Remember, the higher your acceleration along the x axis, the more z-G's you feel (This is actually how that chair in the above video makes you feel acceleration. You will notice as the car accelerates, the chair will pitch up). If flying at low level, you would simply crash into the ground if blindfolded.

 

The other important thing to remember about this is that the aircraft does have an induced load factor imposed upon it in turns. The body cannot sense the load factor as being different from normal gravity, and such will attempt to persuade you into pitching the nose down in order to decrease the load factor, which will start you into a severe spiraling descent.

 

 

 

However, yes, this would be a nifty thing to have, although I'm not sure how useful it would actually be.

 

Cheers,

Pyroflash

Edited May 10, 2012 by Pyroflash

[NineLine]

Why not just a set of straps that tighten and loosen in different directions? Not the feeling of acceleration, but it's tactile feedback- if you feel the straps tighten down around your legs, you're pulling a lot of Gs; if you feel nothing then you're doing zero Gs, if they are pulling up slightly, negative Gs, etc. Seems a lot easier.

 

 

Until that embarrassing moment your computer locks up and you have to have your spouse come cut you out of your chair :)

[Kinex]

This is the kind of things that interest me the most.

 

My ideal simulator is made by two concentric spheres.

The inner sphere is where the sim guy sit and is moved by wheels attached to the outer sphere in contach with the inner sphere. The wheel can rotate in Z axis and also spin. The spinning of the wheel by a high friction cause the inner wheel to spin. I have tons of ideas like this. The force tho they should generete is massive but the idea is that the inner sphere is free to rotate in 3 dimension and change direction very fast. There a lot of technical tricks to achieve this, should not even be hard to do, but the power that such a device would drain in terms of currents and Watt is too much, and a normal house should not be able to feed the Watt to this device. Also this would not give a real G feeling but more an orientation feeling.

[Smokin Hole]

Don't over-rate this. I fly expensive full motion sims annually and, even at $15 million a pop, they do a poor job of reacting to lateral forces in a convincing manner. A convincing and far more violent natural head movement would be far better (not to mention more practical) in my opinion.