A short while back I found myself at Club Auto Sport, an interesting tech incubator for automotive companies, attending a mixer hosted by NVidia.  While you may not think NVidia and Cars have much in common (Aside from the Tegra/Audi collaboration), one of the companies there finds NVidia products a key component of their product. Jack Ulstad runs a business there called ‘Trinity Racing Concepts’ that designs high-end reconfiguration racing simulators.   Jack and his team have build a highly flexible reconfigurable frame, called the ‘Revolution Frame’, that can quickly and easily be converted into everything from NASCAR to Formula 1, providing a wide range of simulations.  They combine their frame with a 3-screen stereoscopic display powered by NVidia 3D Vision technology, force-feedback steering wheel, and custom force-feedback seat. Read on after the break.
Several aspects of the rig are custom in design.  For example, while you can easily go out and buy something like the Logitech G27 Racing Wheel which comes with a gas/brake pedal accessory, they have very little (most would say nonexistant) feedback.  Trinity has built their own custom pedal solution that offers something much closer to real-life, where breaking force increases and the pedal actually pushes back, giving you a much more realistic (and hair-curling) effect when you have to stomp the break to avoid a collision. Their simulation rig runs with what they consider the #1 racing simulation on the market, “iRacing“.  A stock iRacing application with some custom code to drive their custom hardware, and you wind up with a truly amazing experience.  iRacing uses laser-scanned versions of some of the world’s best tracks, giving you a great experience as you run them yourselves. But all of this is just simulation right?  How realistic can it be?  You’ld be amazed.  At the end of the event, we were all invited to take a few laps around the track and try it out for ourselves.  While the graphics themselves are nothing too fancy (Gran Tourismo has better graphics), once it’s added to the force-feedback and (especially) the 3D vision effect, you find your heart racing like you are really there.  Jack has a few professional racers on staff that help him with testing and evaluation of new designs, and they told us that they use his simulators regularly to prepare for unfamiliar tracks in upcoming races. Jack is still actively iterating on his design, and in his shop he had 3 prototypes (Left to Right):___

1. The “First Rev”: A rather large and bulky rig that used a single wide-format curved screen.  The curved screen is DLP and, sadly, not 3D capable.  Also the resolution is rather low.
2. The “First 3D Version”: A much smaller frame, using the Revolution design, with a large Samsung LCD TV mounted on the front for 3D effect. Works great, but little to no peripheral vision due to the single-monitor design.
3. The “Current” version”: Still with the revolution frame, but with 3 smaller LCD monitors driven with NVidia’s 3D Vision technology.

I took a shot on both of the 3d versions, and watched the original for quite a while.  The iRacing simulation is amazing detailed, simulating such tiny details as “cold tires” on start, continuous automotive damage, and drafting.  In one race (driving a Formula1 racer around a simple oval track), I slammed on the gas too hard at the beginning and skidded into a wall (albeit at low speed).  For the rest of the race I could feel the steering wheel pull every so slightly to one side as that tire was badly out of alignment now.  Full collisions (of which myself and FXGuide’s John Montgomery were involved) are truly terrifying events as the seat and steering wheel whip back and forth with enough force to cause some nice bruising if you aren’t careful. And yes, you can flip the cars. Of course, talk is cheap and you can’t truly appreciate the power of Jack’s design without trying it for yourself.  However, that may be easy soon enough, as Jack is currently in the process of building what’s called an ‘iRace Room” in partnership with iRacing.com.  In the iRace Room there will be 10-100 of these Revolution Race Frame simulators all networked together, allowing anyone to walk in off the street and rent some time to run a few races either for entertainment or training.  The frames can be easily reconfigured to match the desired cars, and the collection of tracks is expansive enough to keep most novice’s busy for quite a while.  Plus, with the flexibility of iRacing, he hopes to eventually run entire race series where race fans could partake in their own NASCAR or Formula1 series against their friends over the course of a few weeks, running a few races a day. If you want to check it out yourself, get ahold of Jack over at Trinity Racing Concepts and Club Auto Sport, and while you’re there you can check out some of the amazing cars they have on display.