December 15, 2008
Now that's a racing sim!
Well, guess what every guy who dreams of racing high-performance vehicles hopes Santa is going to stuff under a very, very big tree?
It's the SimCraft Apex-SC830 racing simulator. Plug it into a PC running Windows XP or Windows 2000 and you've got a driving experience close enough to the real thing that some racing teams are signed up to use it.
With three-axis motion (roll 40° / pitch 25° / yaw 40°), the designers say this rig can fool the user's senses into feeling like he's actually on the road.
For those with a less capacious (read: bottomless) bank account, there's the two-axis Apex SC320 (roll 20° / pitch 20°), with just one panel displaying the road ahead.
If only they made one for flight sims.
Oh, wait -- they will.
The cost? Don't know; you have to ask for a quote, which means it's too rich for my tastes. But the bottom line on these things is that they're cheaper to use than the real thing, which is why pro-racing teams are going to emulate the airlines and the military and use sim time to train for the track.
The Apex SC830 is debuting at the International Consumer Electronics Show next month in Las Vegas.
Posted by Mike Lief at December 15, 2008 10:05 PM
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