I finally finished my JME2 project I started so long ago. Big thank you to Irrisor for help with the physics, and Momoko Fan for help with the hardware skinning. The project is a driving simulator designed for measuring performance while text-messaging and driving with the phone in different positions relative to the eyes. The participant drives around a track while trying to maintain pace with a lead vehicle. During this process, he or she exchanges text messages with the researcher, and driving performance is measured on a variety of dimensions by the simulator. The participant is also periodically presented with unusual situations that require a response maneuver – such as swerving or braking to avoid a hazardous obstacle. The simulator itself runs on a 3-monitor eyefinity display system and uses a Logitech G25 setup for the controls. Other elements of the vehicle cabin such as a real car seat and speakers to simulate vehicle sound are provided externally. This project took me quite some time to complete, and I’m happy to be finally finished. Sadly such a large display (~5200x1000) is a huge pain to record while actually operating the simulator. Hopefully the quality of the following video will demonstrate it well enough.
Yeah the monitors are each 1680*1050, and we have three of them side-by-side. In addition, we do “bezel correction” to compensate for the portion of the plastic casing between each monitor, which I believe comes out to 5236x1050, when all is said and done. Combined with camera settings and an appropriate seating arrangement, this provides us with roughly 120 degrees of horizontal FOV. This is the best we could do with JME2 as, as far as I know, there was never any support for multiple monitors. Otherwise, we would have done a “wraparound” orientation as opposed to the very oblong, flat one we have now.
Other than that, the only other limitation we ran into with JME2 was that we had to run on 32 bits due to the unavailability of 64 bit ODE drivers for Windows.
Sure. I’m not at the lab right now but I have an old picture I took more of the seat. It kind of shows the setup, although not in a very refined way.
