Fun at I/ITSEC

Besides being a bit under the weather in Orlando at I/ITSEC, I had an awesome time. I attended the show a few years ago and there was much of the same, but this time with much more VR using Oculus or Vive headsets.  I virtually flew a Blackhawk helicopter at the Wittenstein booth, shot machine guns at the Odyssey Arm booth and piloted a virtual ship around a harbor, which was surprisingly fun. I’ve never seen a ship simulator before this.

My mission here was to see the state of graphics for military simulators, as we just landed a project developing a battlefield simulator for the Air Force. Sadly, the graphics on most of the simulation systems, even for the military are generally pretty flat and ugly. Functionally, the systems work great, but the visuals are far from realistic and that makes no sense to me with the current state of game engine technologies like Unity, Unreal, UniEngine and more. This makes me appreciate X-Plane 11 even more, as I felt my own home system is in better shape than some of these sims I saw for professional use.

There were many professional motion platforms on display, including seats with built in actuators and hydraulics and pressure suits to simulate high G-force maneuvers.  Here’s a pretty cool video of one of the larger motion platforms on a demo loop.


 

 

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