A large elasticated band supports the weight of the user, and platform, and the linear actuator lifts and lowers them. Fast, responsive and most importantly : cheap! Seems pretty crazy that you can spend $4k on an actuator for every motion range except heave!

In the meantime I decided to do a little research in to KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. Basically you head over to www.similarweb.com, type in the URL of your competitors in your field and it throws a bunch of information back at you such as the estimate of their traffic, where most of their links come from and where they advertise…. it’s really very neat, and free. A great way to check out other simulators.

It’s pretty hard to know exactly how many sales the other companies are getting but comparing our traffic to most of the others puts us in a pretty nice position already, despite only having a website for a short time and still have no product to sell. it seems most of the other sim makers out there are resting on their laurels and we’re going to swoop in and pick up all their potential customers!

Since I have my freshly revived skills of video editting back in use I think it’s time to put together a proper video of exactly what the feelthree is, how it works and why it’s so cool. This is long over due and means people will have a 5 minute visual demonstration of all the cool ideas we have and how we’ll manage to put it together so affordably…

Watch this space!

CKAS Thruxim

• static overload (G-force) = up to 0.5G
  
• dynamic overload = up to 2G

Blue Tiger

“BlueTiger provides ±20° of independent pitch and ±20° of independent roll. However, the nature of the BlueTiger geometry also moves the rider through ±10″ heave, ±8″ surge, and ±8″ sway associated with the pitch and roll movements.” No details

Motion Simulation

None, their ‘motion’ simulator doesn’t move, and their tag line is “Motion Simulation – Prepare to be moved” :p

CXC

“It’s not how far you move, nor about how many degrees of freedom. Rather it’s how fast you accelerate that movement and the sensations interpreted by the brain.” No details.

SimExperience

“Simulates vehicle weight transfer in addition to road texture and G-Forces”. No details.

Simcraft Apex3

• Roll 50 degrees       (+/- 25)
• Pitch 25 degrees       (+/- 12.5)
• Yaw 50 degrees       (+/- 25)

_________________________________

Max Speed……………..60 deg/s
Max Acceleration……..167 deg/s/s

And “ Guaranteed ZERO latency “.

Profisim

“THE BEST FULL MOTION SYSTEM” No details

Atomic A2

Maximum velocity
71.2 degrees/second
Maximum torque
64.4 Nm
Maximum pitch & roll
27 degrees

Motion for Simulators

Uncopyable pictures, but max 36 deg/s

Force Dynamics

Motion

Roll: +/- 30 degrees
Pitch: +/- 30 degrees
Heave: +/- 20cm (8 inches)
Yaw: +/- 90 degrees

Hmmmm, it seems like a lot of companies prefer flowery language and nice designs rather than hard figures.

Doesn’t seem like anyone has actually figured it out completely.

Not sure how I missed this one but they didn’t add any usual keywords such as ‘3DOF’ or ‘motion simulator’…

They wanted $48,000 for the project and the unit’s would cost $5k….

They managed to get $192 in funds

So, here is a great lesson perhaps in how not to kickstart something.

No website.

No facebook connected.

No projects backed.

Badly produced video, especially the sound.

Overly ambitious goal.

And it looks like you could easily be decapitated when it’s moving…. :p

The simple pitch and roll solution with belts looks like this :

This is the view from the bottom of the sphere, motors on the sides and the belts are the blue lines.

Instead, if we have motors that are off the axis but aligned they could not only pitch the sphere but depending on how much each side pulls, rotate it as well.

Belts are blue and green here.

As I was drawing it I realised a similar system already exists, albeit not in this field. It’s used in some 3D printers and could be adapted to fit our needs here. It wouldn’t give us full rotation, I guestimate only 90 degrees yaw and I’ll have to figure out how to avoid interference with the belts but it’s an idea worth considering.

Check out CoreXY to read about Cartesian Motion to your hearts content

Seems they came up with the idea in 2009 but doesn’t look like they followed it though. Their use of air to lift the platform, like playing air hockey, is quite nice since it means the skin can be relatively weak as the load is spread over a large area. However the airpump is quite noisy and the system would need to stay airtight for it to work. Using strong rotational wheels is a cheaper, simpler solution.

The problem is moving the platform, ie you, in at least 2 degrees of motion quickly and a fairly large distance. However, every single solution relies on  basic premise that hasn’t changed since flight simulators were invented : they lift the platform. This means the motors must be expensive and use a lot of power since if someone weighs 100kg, even a 3dof platform needs to lift 33kg each and if you require a large amount of motion the power requirements are huge.

That is why this platform cost $10k, the motors were $5000 for six and the control unit was $2500.

[iframe width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/zNUBZfrOXUc” ]

Some prefer to balance the platform on a spring which reduced the power needed but we still have a small range of motion and this can be quite jerky.

[iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/VbFjA0S3w3w” ]