New F-16 flight simulator running on 120 PC graphic cards

L-3 Link Simulation is building a new generation of military jet trainers that uses high-definition video and take real-world realism up a couple of notches.

It incorporates the latest developments in high-definition video, off-the-shelf digital imaging technology (120 Intel Dual Core PCs complete with $400 graphics cards) and a "physics-based environment generator" that allows creation of high-fidelity environments, actual world destruction and explosions with physics simulation, and up to 10,000 simultaneous entities on screen in urban environments.

See: <a href="news_article3523.html">F-16 flight simulator running on 120 PC graphic cards</a>

Check out the video at <a href="http://www.star-telegram.com/business/story/1419736.html">star-telegram.com</a>

Wow. That looks so cool.

Wow, so much more detail and better field of view than the standard military F-16 simulator.

What is the price?

One issue I always had with projection system sims is the lack of depth perception although the detail is pretty cool.

Certainly several orders of magnitude better than the 3-screen visual system my machines had when I worked for Link.

Cost-effective, scalable hi-def projection tech has finally caught up to the dome/faceted visual concept it would seem. This is a real game changer. I flew one of the Tucson WSTs with SimuSphere back in '05 and it was nice but not spectacular (perhaps cuz it was a tour and it may have been sanitized for little 'ol me ). Essentially running the same visual database thru the SimuSphere hardware. A realistic hi-def display and networking capability promises to increase training effectiveness dramatically and may actually make pilots WANT to go to the sim for a change! I'm also curious if they pipe the NV imagery thru head-tracker equipped simulated NVGs or just turn the dome display to a NV equivalent representation. Hmmmmm.....

And the fact they only spent $15 million over 4 years to get it to the I/ITSEC demo stage is quite impressive management in the whole industrial scheme o'things.

I'm also curious if they pipe the NV imagery thru head-tracker equipped simulated NVGs or just turn the dome display to a NV equivalent representation. Hmmmmm.....

I don’t know this system, but when a visual database is FLIR coded, for example, for a HUD IR mode display in a civilian aircraft level D simulator with an IR camera (B-737-800, MD-11, Global Express, etc.), all the FLIR coding is stored on the same computer as the VDB, but is only used and displayed by the HUD computer & projector.

So if you look around or behind the HUD, you see the normal visual display even though the HUD display is a simulated real-time FLIR’ed image. If it’s possible to look outside or around the NVG’s (I don’t know this to be true however), having the whole dome FLIR’ed wouldn’t be realistic, but would be easier.

Because, what this dual image system does create is the constant requirement to keep the two simulation systems aligned properly. And the alignment is usually only perfect for one specific tunable range, although the rest of the image overlay will be “close” if the IR FOV is not too large. Of course, though while the aircraft is moving, the HUD doesn’t move around in the aircraft like someone’s head wearing a simulated NVG system making NVG alignment more important and more difficult.

OL

Maybe we should not be to happy about this new fancy stuff, it will only steal flighthours from the pilots

Dang it.. I thought there was a new Multi-player PC F-16 sim

Anyways, too bad this vid wasn't available for public access