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

• Moog Motion Platform - A six degree-of-freedom 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.

• Ford Contour 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

• ECCI Trackstar 6000 Pedals - The unit comes with 3 floor pedals (accelerator, brake, and clutch), each spring-loaded and mechanically actuated and pressure modulated.

• Ricmotech Mini-Mite Direct-Drive Steering System Base - A direct-drive, force-feedback steering system that comes with a leather steering wheel with 13.5” diameter, 900 degrees of angular rotation, rear-wheel paddle shifters, and 6 wheel buttons for driver input and feedback.

Visualization

• M1 Interactive Ring Screen – Our visualization system consists of a 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 SONY VPL-FH36B LCD Projectors – Each visualization screen is front-projected with a SONY LCD projector, featuring: 3900 ANSI Lumen brightness, a 2000:1 contrast ratio, and WUXGA (1920x1200, 16:10) native resolution.

• 2x Matrox TripleHead2Go DP Edition – External multi-display adapter that expands each graphics output channel (on the graphics card) into 3 distinct display channels.

• 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).

Cumulative Display Resolution (pixels) – 11520 (circumference) x 1080 (height)

Sound

• Sound System – A stereo 2.1 (front-left, front-right, and L.F.E. subwoofer) channel external sound system powered by a Creative Labs SoundBlaster PC soundcard and an Audioengine N22 desktop audio amplifier.

Computation

• Dell Precision T7500 Tower Workstation – A tower graphics workstation with dual-core 2.16 GHz Intel Xeon processors, 12 GB Memory, and an EVGA Nvidia GeForce 1080 GTX graphics processor. This workstation has 6 (1920x1080) monitors (one for each visualization screen), and controls all aspects of our motion simulations (e.g., graphics/motion/audio cueing and accompanying real-time simulation analysis).

User Controls

• Varjo XR3 Head Mounted Display – Integrated Ultraleap Gemini (v5) hand tracking

• SteamVR 2.0 – Motion based positional tracking

• HTC Vive Controller – 24-sensor handheld controller

Visualization

• Varjo XR3 Head Mounted Display – Combined 70 PPD uOLED 1920x1920 focus area and 30 PPD LCD 2880x2720 peripheral area per eye resolution, 115 degree field of view, 90 Hz refresh rate, low latency 12 megapixel video passthrough at 90 Hz, 99% sRGB, 93% DCI-P3

Sound

• Varjo XR3 HMD – Integrated headset

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