Dream of the day: The Virtual Cockpit

ELTEE

ELTEE

Vice Admiral
I wanted to share my wishlist for a PC based cockpit setup because work is slow today and let's face it; I'd rather be flying.

I think the actual technology to do most of this exists - it would just be prohibitively expensive.

The 'office' - I imagine a decent gaming seat with access to rudder pedals, throttle and stick. Pretty easy with existing tech. Maybe limited rumble. Why not? If N64 had it...:D

The instrument panel - a key piece of the equation. I'm envisioning a glass cockpit made up of 3 or 4 MFD's. Each could be a USB plug in. This would allow cusomization of the displays by various games so that one instrument panel would work with multiple titles. The MFD's could be touch screen or simply encircled with switches as in 4th gen fighters. You could modify it in an options screen.
I know the hardware exists for this tech - at this point, we see it in most new single engine general aviation planes, so it can't be that far out of the realm.

HUD - self explanatory. Could be integrated into the display, but with HUDs appearing on passengar vehicles, I can't see how this would be that difficult to implement. Again, a customizeable display.

Screen - Here's the tricky part. Do we have the tech to do wrap around screens yet? Maybe we'd still have to settle for single flat panels in windows or something...

My father and I built an F-117 cockpit when I was growing up for fun. I've always wanted to hook up some flat panels to it and make it a gaming cockpit. I was recently re-inspired when I attended a race at Limerock and noticed there were complete 'driving simulators' for sale...

Anyway, post some thoughts and feedback! What would you want to see? What can be done today?
 
I've been thinking about building a cockpit enclosure for my Wing Commander machine for some years and as I become an increasingly freetimefull adult human I'm getting closer to pulling the trigger.

My goal would be somewhat different from yours -- building the perfect spaceship interior setup to allow me to switch between all possible versions of Wing Commander with all the best possible interface options (stick/rudder/.

Junior Wing Commander cockpit builders might do well to try ebaying up one or more of these cull MDFs -- http://www.quickshot.com/game_controllers/mp98.html I bought one on a whim some years ago and it's actually REALLY REALLY COOL looking in person... everyone who see's the thing remarks about it. It's just a fancy looking key-combo mapper, but it's made of heavy metal and has all kinds of glowing lights and number readouts... and it has presets for four Wing games! You can chain them together and use up to four at once, I believe -- just have to find that many.
 
I want to see the rumble pants that appeared in one of nintendo's april fool's issues come to reality. They never passed the testing phase, but I believe rumble pants would revolutionize gameplay like this- you take a hard g turn, you're gonna feel it...

Also, the quickest way to beat someone in an FPS if they're wearing rumble pants is not a headshot ;)

EDIT due to LOAF's post-whoa, that thing IS sweet! Makes me want to get one... *checks pockets* DANG YOU COLLEGE!
 
LOAF! That thing is awesome! I'm going to get one.

That's pretty much what I was talking about with my MFD idea above. A few of those, and no keyboard is required. You have enough 'button' real estate to map everything you would need.

As for the cockpit you have in mind, what are you going to use for displays? One computer monitor and and one of those headset trackers? Or 3 displays, one for front, left and right? I don't know if I like those headset trackers - they take some getting used to.

Sort of related - I could never decide on what I wanted rudder pedals to do in a starfighter. I actually fly with the rudder pedals controlling roll most of the time- that seemed to work the best for me.
 
As for the cockpit you have in mind, what are you going to use for displays? One computer monitor and and one of those headset trackers? Or 3 displays, one for front, left and right? I don't know if I like those headset trackers - they take some getting used to.
Click to expand...

Well, that's where we differ -- the modern flight sim fan can use all kinds of cool stuff to wrap himself in air combat... but Wing Commander doesn't really have a way to take advantage of any of it.
 
Hmm - isn't there a way to simultaneously generate data for those three primary views? I know that in pretty much every WC game, you can look to your left or right. Is there a way to fool the game into displaying those two views to different monitors?

I'm probably musing right out of my a** here, but it would be a neat technical challenge!
 
I wouldn't bet on it -- the games weren't designed to output that data. HCl could probably hack something together for WCP/SO...

I guess you could come up with some physical switch that would swap from monitor to monitor when you selected a particular view... but it'd probably end up being more annoying then immersive.
 
There were a few arcade machines that were virtual moving cockpits, though to make something that you have to know how to fly a real aqircraft for would be too hardcore for a lot of people and thus no one has made Flight Simulator arcade where you sit in a real Cessna yet.
 
Governor Palin also enjoys pretend cockpits:

GovPalin_at_Aviation_Day_simulator_med.jpg
 
That picture is friggin awesome. Who says she has a lack of experience? Please - that picture proves otherwise! :D

In all seriousness, I'm actually kind of jealous. That's a pretty sweet setup... How do you get the instruments to display to a dedicated screen like that??

Her hubby has a Super Cub also - I hate them both!

As for the moving cockpit idea - I'm not so sure. I was lucky enough when I was younger to have access to military-grade simulators, and I did pretty well in them (and typical commercial flight sims) before I ever received my pilot's license and learned to fly in reality.
 
Actually, "simpits" are quite common.

There are programs for Microsoft Flight Simulator that use its internal interfaces to export flight data to other computers (which can often be for virtual instruments/glass cockpits). Other programs, like X-Plane, support such interfaces natively.

Now, what that photo is showing is a flight training device, which are often specially rigged with their own software to drive the multiple displays and get input from the various cockpit items.

But there are projects like OpenGC (http://opengc.sourceforge.net/), Project Magenta (http://www.projectmagenta.com/) etc., to help drive PFDs and MFDs. And there are USB devices that provide many I/O's necessary for switches, knobs, displays (numeric) (the name of them escapes me at the moment).

I have seen some really fantastic simpits - someone managed to get the nose of a Boeing (737?) and turn it into a simulator. As usual, Wikipedia has some good information on it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpit

There's one I have been following for years (yes, these things can easily take years to build) - http://www.f15sim.com/ - the guy has managed to get an F-15 cockpit and is fabricating a lot of the pieces himself.

Wonderful things, if you have the time, skill, money and most of all, an understanding significant other.
 
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