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Flight….A century has gone by since we mastered controlled powered flight but it still maintains a deep a fascination for many of us. Globally, there are several avid flight enthusiasts. An airplane flying in the sky, the drone of a jet engine rarely fails to catch thier attention. Regardless of the level to which they understand the concepts underlying the concept of flight, the very fact something so heavy can even take off from the ground and fly like a bird never ceases to enamour them. A big part of this is due to the significant complexity that an aircraft brings with it. The other is because for many the experience of being on the flight deck can only be a dream – one that most will never experience.
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First Powered Flight (c) World Of Aviation
Here is where the science of simulation comes into play. While we all remain indebted to early pioneers of flight, there is something to be said to extending that credit to organizations that leverage simulation sciences to produce what is today known as the gaming experience. The simulation experience comes into play in many different dimensions. There are home design simulators, rail-road simulators, car simulators, flight simulators, fitness simulators and a whole lot more. Gaming brings about a new dimension to our entertainment experience. For flight enthusiasts, it provides an opportunity to get some part of that flight experience.
The joy of gaming is a direct function of how well the experience is simulated – and for the experience to be simulated well, all dimensions of the experience must be experienced and experienced right. The holy grail of simulation lies in delivering an experience that is as close to real as possible. This site is dedicated to the sharing of ongoing research in delivering this experience. For the purpose of the study, one can pick any simulation realm – home design, automobile, flight…. any one of them. However flight gaming perhaps has been around the longest and offers the richest opportunity for study.
Flight simulation as a science goes a long way back – early simulators have been used since 1910 – during world war I. PC-based Flight simulators have been around for over 25 years – since Microsoft released version 2! Back then, one could a few keys to move a little aircraft forward and then use keys to take off, turn and land the little plane on something that looked a runway – that is if you could use the keys fast enough to align the plane on the runway, else you would off course land it on in some field! The simulator couldnt tell the difference!
Of course, over the past 2 decades, the flight sim community today has grown significantly and flight simmers today have a host of products to enhance thier simulation experience.
If on one hand, the very concept of flight captivates our mind, the science of simulation equally captures our imagination. In some ways, it can be said that simulation – the ability to model some behavior and then reproduce it with accuracy – is even harder than buidling the real thing. Its never easy reproducing reality. Virtual reality is easy to describe but very hard to make real.
Flight simulator products provide a great platform that runs on PCs and allows for the user to use the keyboard and mouse to control an airplane. However, one is very constrained by the use of the keys and mouse and the experience is very limited. After sometime, the need to use the keyboard, find the right keys at the right time, use the mouse, trying to make it point to the switch etc undermines the entire experience.
This work is focused on flight simulation research. Research into whether its possible to achieve high levels of fidelity by using commodity computing clusters – which then translates into reducing the over all costs of what flight simulators will cost in the future.
The project intended to make the best of what Microsoft flight simulator provided but at the same time extend that capabilty to provide a fuller experience. The rest of this site is devoted to sharing with other hobbyists my experience of doing so. It consists of sharing my research into the many products that the flight sim community has access to today. It also consists of describing the wood cutting, framing, painting, soldering, etc that i have gone through in trying to make it work. I have spent 6 years on it now and am sure its something that will take me many many years more to complete – but as i realized early in the hobby, the journey is the most enjoyable part. Trying to make something work, figuring out how to use new tools, using my imagination to solve a problem… is gratification in itself.
This website has many intents. One of them being to articulate my experience of the effort through the many months of my time that i have poured into it and the learning that has come from it. The second is to enable those who would wouls like to follow through on some aspects of the research. Thirdly, to use the outcomes to educate children about the concept of flight and help remove some of the mystery that it holds for most of us.
Music score – Vedant Sharma
