Equipment

The simRING features the front end of a car mounted on a moving platform that emulates the real-life motions of a car as it reacts to turns, changes in elevation, and other road conditions.  

A 360-degree, 16-foot diameter, 6’ high screen fully surrounds the simulator vehicle, which provides the driver with a full-fidelity depiction of surrounding traffic, landmarks, and roadway conditions. The system likewise features on-board controls to navigate the simulator, as well as a stereo sound system that emulates noises heard inside and outside the vehicle during a typical driving excursion.

The technical capabilities of the MSL have enabled more than $6 million in faculty-driven research over the last decade.

Motion/Cabin system

• Moog 1500kg “Gen3” 6-DOF Motion Platform: A six degree-of-freedom (DOF) motion platform powered by six DC servomotor-driven ball screw design actuators. The platform is capable of supporting up to a maximum payload of 1000 kg on a 1.84 m by 1.84 m triangular base. Individually, the angular degrees of freedom (pitch, roll, yaw) of ±22° are possible at a rate up to 30 °/s. and an acceleration of up to 500 °/s2. Displacement degrees of freedom are approximately ±0.2 m at rates up to 0.5 m/s and 0.5 g of acceleration.

• 2016 Ford Mustang convertible Passenger Cabin: The cabin has been augmented to minimize excess weight, and includes: 2 front seats with seat belts, a steering wheel and pedals, a full front vehicle console (for on-board instrumentation), rear and side-view mirrors (for rearward view and blind-spot verification), and an emergency stop switch.

User Controls (HID)

• Steering: Native Ford Mustang steering wheel attached to a torque motor game controller.  The Ricmotech Mini-Mite direct-drive, force-feedback steering system.

• Pedals:  Native gas/brake floor pedals with load cells (Applied Measurements LTD) and precision microcontroller (Leo Bodnar) for analog-to-digital conversion.

Visualization system

• M1 Interactive Ring Display Screen: Our visualization system consists of an overhead, truss-mounted circular 16’ diameter, 6’ high Ring Screen mounted 5 feet off the ground. This system provides the driver with a fully immersive 360-degree field-of-view while driving.

• 6x Optoma HCPRO-4400 Dual Laser Home Cinema Projectors: Each visualization screen is front-projected with an Optoma 4K laser projector, featuring: 5000 lumens of brightness, a 3,200,000:1 contrast ratio, and UHD (3840x2160)-capable resolution per display channel.  Note that the current cumulative Display Resolution (pixels) – 11520 (circumference) x 1080 (height) in HD mode.

• 2x Matrox TripleHead2Go DP Edition: External multi-display adapter that expands each graphics output channel (on the graphics card) into 3 distinct display channels, each in HD resolution at 50 Hz.

• Extron DXP HD 4K Series HDMI (44 and 88) Switchers: High performance matrix switchers that enable input display signals (from the computer) to be converted for output to our display system projectors (simulator) and flat panel monitor displays (control booth).

Audio

• Sound system: The sound system consists of a surround (7.1.4) sound system soundbar (JBL Bar-1000), including HDMI sound output directly from our graphics engine.

Computation

• Dell Pro Max Tower T2 FCT2250 Workstation: A tower graphics workstation with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K (36 MB cache, 24 cores, 24 threads, 3.2 GHz to 5.7 GHz, 125W) processor; 128 GB (RAM) Memory, 2 TB of on-board hard disk space.  The Workstation controls all aspects of our simulations (e.g., graphics/motion/audio cueing and accompanying real-time physics-based simulation analyses).

• NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition graphics processor: includes 96 GB GDDR7 with ECC (G-RAM) with 24,064 CUDA® Cores

• 6x Workstation control monitors: This workstation has Samsung 4K (3920x2160) Business S80UA Series 27” Viewfinity monitors (one for each visualization screen) 

User Controls

• SteamVR 2.0 – Motion based positional tracking

• HTC Vive Controller – 24-sensor handheld controller

• Blync Steering Sensor – multidirectional steering controller designed for bicycle trainers

• Wahoo Kickr – bicycle speed and resistance controller

Visualization & Sound

• Varjo XR3 Head Mounted Display 

• HTC Vive Pro

Computation

• Custom-built High Performance Desktop - INTEL Core i9 13900K 24-core processor, 2x MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24GB GDDR6X graphics cards, 128G Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 4800MHz RAM, and 11TB SSD storage

Eye Tracking

• Pupil Neon Mobile Eye Tracking Glasses 

• Varjo XR3 Head Mounted Display 

GSR and PPG

• Shimmer3 GSR+ 

• Polar H10 ECG