Simulators
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How The Gadget Show built its FPS simulator (video)
Remember The Gadget Show's FPS simulator that we showed you last week? Armed with naught but a pre-release level of Battlefield 3 and £500,000 ($650,000), it transformed a Birmingham studio into the sort of game room only multi-billionaires can dream of (as long as the dreams involved getting shot back, the sim comes packing paintball markers). The episode, which shows how this slice of gaming greatness came to be, has just finished airing here in the UK, where streaming and catch-up services aren't available to those outside the country. Fortunately for you lot, our friends at the show have uploaded the feature for you to watch in all its glory after the break.
The Gadget Show builds an FPS simulator that shoots back (video)
Racing simulators are ten a penny, but the closest an FPS player will get to an immersive experience is buying some branded peripherals. Armed with a pre-release level of Battlefield 3, The Gadget Show enlisted a team of design experts to transform a Birmingham studio into an FPS simulator costing £500,000 ($650,000). A four by nine meter video dome surrounds the player as they stand on an omni-directional treadmill that lets you walk wherever you want to go. Ten infra-red motion tracking cameras and a sensor on your gun enables the picture to follow where you point it and a Kinect hack controls your jumping and crouching. The fun doesn't stop there -- 12 paintball markers mean that every time you get shot in the game, you'll feel it. The show airs in the UK on October 24th at 8:00pm, Channel 5. We've got a behind the scenes gallery below (supplied by those lovely people from the show) as well as PR and a trailer after the break. %Gallery-136970%
Robot arm takes engineers for a virtual reality Formula 1 ride (video)
As it turns out, industrial-strength robot arms are good for more than amusing hijinks and the occasional assembly line -- a team of researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have turned a KUKA KR 500 into the ultimate Formula 1 simulator ride. Outfitting the six-axis, half-ton lifter with a force-feedback steering wheel, pedals, video projector and curved screen, the newly-christened CyberMotion Simulator lets scientists throw a virtual Ferrari F2007 race car into the turns, while the cockpit whips around with up to 2 Gs of equal-and-opposite Newtonian force. There's actually no loftier goal for this particular science project, as the entire point was to create a racing video game that feels just like the real thing -- though to be fair, a second paper tested to see whether projectors or head-mounted displays made for better drivers. (Projectors won.) See how close they came to reality in a video after the break, while we go perform a little experiment of our own. [Thanks, Eric]
