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Russia's MiG Aircraft Company Develops 3D Flight Simulator
Zothecula writes "Russian aircraft company MiG is best known for its fighter planes which have been used by the USSR, China, North Korea and North Vietnam since the beginning of WWII. These days, the former Government-owned RAC MiG is a publicly traded entity and competes on the open market with its technologies, having more than 1600 of its MiG-29 fighters in operation in 25 countries. Now MiG is claiming a major first in military aviation with the launch of a 3D flight simulator at the Dubai Air Show, providing volumetric visualization of beyond-the-cockpit space for trainee top guns. The simulator comes complete with the MiG-29's cockpit and actual control systems."
I was hoping for a new entry in the PC sim arena. Oh well.
Seems strange that this is big news (is it really?) - I'd think it would be obvious to apply 3D projection to flight simulators, and pretty damn easy to do. Digital projectors capable of high-resolution 3D are not exactly new, and neither are active shutter glasses. Somewhat expensive until fairly recently, but that's probably not a huge concern for military-grade (or aviation in general) flight simulators.
Charlie's dying to know, and no one believes Maverick & Goose.
Wishful thinking:
The make a "demilitarized" version of it - maybe without the weapon systems and the radar - some amusement park / arcade buys one these. I pay $ XX an hour and get as close to flying a supersonic fighter aircraft as I possibly can.
"...providing volumetric visualization of beyond-the-cockpit space..." In soviet russia planes fly the pilots.
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At least it shouldn't be. I mean, when guys are building fully collimated displays in their garage, in their spare time, the big boys had better have holodecks.
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You mean they were the "first to create a real 3D flight simulator?"
Next thing you know, people will have them in their bedrooms
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Our triangulated sense of depth registers "infinity" a few hundred feet out. What do you see out the window of a plane that is less than a few hundred feet out? Maybe a little bit of the runway when you're landing, that's about it.
Want.
Physical arcade games where you drove a physical toy car over a looping belt. No computer needed.
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"providing volumetric visualization of beyond-the-cockpit space for trainee top guns."
They also used some scenes from Top Gun in the simulator.
Most things seen from the cockpit are for all (optical) intents and purposes "infinitely far away" i.e. they have no parallax.
A 3D sim with an on screen glass cockpit would be a useful innovation, but definitely something aimed at the cheaper end of the market.
I work for a company that builds flight sims BTW, so I guess I'm biased.
I think we were hoping for 3D based on the summary, and unless I missed something those, while impressive, are still only 2D.
It should be capable of 3D output with enough hardware, but I'm assuming the advance in this MiG simulator is optimizing the output. For example, things that are really far away don't need to be 3D, or even separated in the 3rd dimension.
So you can set a limit, like modern open-air 3D games do these days. Everything over X feet away, whatever the limit of human vision is, gets a standard spacing and the "stereoscopic" image is just a copy of the original render. Everything inside the sphere gets a dual render and distance-shifted spacing like normal 3D. Making the jump between the two has to be seemless, or it will induce nausea. Tackling these is the tough part.
having worked in the simulation industry, while this sounds good it doesn't actually work very well.
A key requirement for a flight simulator visual is the field of view, and especially for fighter jets you want as close to
a 360 degree view as you can get. The cheap 3D technology can't do 3D over a larger field of view, so it's not useful
for someone looking around trying to find an enemy aircraft, or even looking out over the wing to do formation flying.
In general nothing is ever close enough to the aircraft for 3D to make a significant different. As the article outlines
air-to-air refueling is probably the only case. It may be useful then if you are willing to build a separate simulator
just to train for the one task.
I was more addressing the implication in the OP that the PC sim market was faltering/missing in general rather than just stereoscopic 3D. I did miss that though, I read 3D and think, well we've had 3D since what.. quake3d? or earlier. :)
I wonder what nVidia/AMD's stereoscopic 3D extrapolation tech would do with something like the ED flight sims.
So whats the big deal?
X-Plane has been capable of this for as long as I've known about it. Several versions at a minimum. Has all the settings built in to simulate 3d in multiple ways, goggles being the simplest, with some other people building in other neat systems like head positioning sensing instead of goggles (think Jason Lee's Wii demos).
If you went the goggle route and X-Plane you could use multiple machines to render a full sphere around you (X-Plane has all the settings to do it already as well as people who have built 360 degree faux cockpits already using multiple renderers (havent' seen full 360 cd yet)
Its a shame these guys went through all that effort to make software that they could buy for $100. Are developers THAT cheap in Russia?
And yes, X-Plane is high enough quality, its FAA certified for training already.
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Wow, maybe you can enlighten me as to what MiG fighters, were in WWII, as I understood it they arrived in the early 60's.
I will not buy one yet. May be I will wait for the cracked version.
...out of your wallet? Haw!
Does it use GeForce cards? Double haw!