Tom Scott<\/span> is here to prove you wrong as he test drives a fascinating ’70s-era tank simulator that relies on a tiny camera exploring a detailed model of a miniature European countryside.<\/p>\nModern 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n