DECEMBER 1, 2015- ORLANDO STARTUP BREAKS THROUGH ON SIMULATOR LATENCY
An Orlando simulation company says it has developed a way to soften so-called “simulator sickness,” or the motion sickness some get during extended sessions in a simulator.
Serious Simulations CEO Christopher Chambers said it’s the difference between 17 milliseconds and 17 microseconds.
That tiny amount of time represents the lag between a person’s motion and the movement of an environment in a heads-up display. Chambers says the reason behind it is simple.
“It’s a matter of duplicating human movement and the ability for it to be natural,” he said. “Our ideal is 100 percent human motion with the interface.”
But the industry is not quite there, Chambers said, although new hardware developed by Serious has set the industry on its way.
Chambers, a U.S. Army veteran who established Serious Simulations in July of 2014, said his time in the military helped shape his ideas about virtual reality.
“From my own years as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army, I knew that virtual reality training had a real future,” he said. “However, it could work only if peripheral vision and realistic human movements could be used to properly reinforce skills needed for combat.”
With industries such as law enforcement, military and commercial industry and sports training all using virtual reality to an extent, Chambers hopes the application of the new technology can be just as large.
Chambers started Serious Simulations in Orlando after moving here from Texas, in an effort to be near the area’s thriving simulation community, which is hosting the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference this week.
“If you’re a company in military simulation, you have to be in Orlando,” he said. “It’s the world’s headquarters for simulation and, in particular, military simulation