I'm in Awe of This '70s-Era Tank Simulator That Uses a Tiny Camera Roaming a Miniature Model - Gizmodo

If you assumed that subject grooming simulators were lone made imaginable with the advent of 3D graphics and virtual reality, Tom Scott is present to beryllium you incorrect arsenic helium trial drives a fascinating ‘70s-era vessel simulator that relies connected a tiny camera exploring a elaborate exemplary of a miniature European countryside.

Modern simulators, whether they recreate the acquisition of driving a beastly conveyance oregon flying an aircraft, usage a operation of real-time machine graphics and full-size cockpit recreations that determination and shingle and vibrate successful cleanable sync with what a aviator oregon operator is seeing connected a surface oregon wrong a virtual world headset. The acquisition is incredibly convincing, and an effectual mode to springiness a trainee hundreds of hours of acquisition with a conveyance without putting them, oregon the existent thing, astatine risk.

Military cogwheel has ever been cutting borderline and precise expensive, truthful simulators person agelong been a utile grooming tool, but earlier computers were almighty capable to make convincing 3D graphics, gathering a convincing simulator required an wholly antithetic approach, arsenic Tom Scott discovered portion visiting the Swiss Military Museum successful Switzerland.

Trainees (or tourists, these days) ascent into a recreation of a vessel cockpit, featuring each the controls you’d find successful the existent thing, which sits atop a motorized basal that tin determination the cockpit astir successful each directions. When looking retired the tiny beforehand model of the tank, the operator doesn’t spot the existent world, but a surface displaying a unrecorded video provender from a tiny camera that explores a adjacent miniature recreation of the rolling countryside, with the camera’s movements controlled by the vessel cockpit.

The simulator is simply a marvel of brute unit engineering, but it’s the tiny things that assistance truly merchantability the effect that the idiosyncratic successful the vessel cockpit is truly successful power and driving a full-size vehicle. The moving camera is housed wrong a bluish shroud that moves on with it truthful that what’s seen implicit the skyline successful the video provender ever looks similar bluish sky. And beneath the tiny camera is simply a tiny pivoting ft that slides on the creaseless roadways successful the miniature model, but pivots up and down erstwhile traversing rougher terrain, similar logs, with those motions being translated to the tank’s cockpit successful real-time.

It took the depository implicit 2 years to rebuild the retired vessel simulator and get it moving again, and portion it inactive uses the archetypal video gear, including the tiny camera that was astir apt a marvel of engineering backmost successful the ‘70s, its machine power strategy had to beryllium wholly replaced with, unbelievably, a $35 Raspberry Pi.