If you assumed that army coaching simulators had been solely made potential with the arrival of 3D graphics and digital actuality, Tom Scott is right here to show you flawed as he check drives an enchanting ‘70s-era tank simulator that relies on a tiny camera exploring a detailed model of a miniature European countryside.

Modern simulators, whether they recreate the experience of driving a beastly vehicle or flying an aircraft, use a combination of real-time computer graphics and full-size cockpit recreations that move and shake and vibrate in perfect sync with what a pilot or driver is seeing on a screen or inside a virtual reality headset. The experience is incredibly convincing, and an effective way to give a trainee hundreds of hours of experience with a vehicle without putting them, or the real thing, at risk.

Military gear has always been cutting edge and very expensive, so simulators have long been a useful training tool, but before computers were powerful enough to generate convincing 3D graphics, building a convincing simulator required an entirely different approach, as Tom Scott discovered while visiting the Swiss Military Museum in Switzerland.

Trainees (or tourists, these days) climb into a recreation of a tank cockpit, featuring all the controls you’d discover in the true factor, which sits atop a motorized base that may transfer the cockpit round in all instructions. When looking the tiny entrance window of the tank, the driving force doesn’t see the true world, however a display displaying a dwell video feed from a tiny digicam that explores a close-by miniature recreation of the rolling countryside, with the digicam’s actions managed by the tank cockpit.

The simulator is a marvel of brute drive engineering, however it’s the small issues that assist actually promote the impact that the individual within the tank cockpit is admittedly in management and driving a full-size automobile. The transferring digicam is housed inside a blue shroud that strikes together with it in order that what’s seen over the horizon within the video feed at all times appears to be like like blue sky. And beneath the tiny digicam is a small pivoting foot that slides alongside the sleek roadways within the miniature mannequin, however pivots up and down when traversing rougher terrain, like logs, with these motions being translated to the tank’s cockpit in real-time.

It took the museum over two years to rebuild the retired tank simulator and get it working once more, and whereas it nonetheless makes use of the unique video gear, together with the tiny digicam that was most likely a marvel of engineering again within the ‘70s, its laptop management system needed to be fully changed with, unbelievably, a $35 Raspberry Pi.