Immersion

Carlos Casas (Total Spanish Simulator) wrote a useful guide a few months ago about how to get full immersion in our sim. Here it is a briefly translation.

Setting hardware the right way

1. Distance to the main screen

“The closer, the better”

As you probably imagine, the closer you are, the better realism and immersion you get.

With this subject in mind there are different variables, as the screen size.
Below 27 inches ideal distance is about 60 cm, always calculating from the driver eyes to the main screen.
Bigger screens need to increase this distance up to 10 cm, no more. Over 70 cm is not recommend because lack of coherence between “real” and “virtual” objects.

It takes time to accommodate to these kind of short distances.

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2. Height of the sight

Right focus of our sight has to be in straight line to the “road”. You achieve this when your eyes are at the 60% of the height of the screen. There is no need to change the focus or other inconveniences physical issues.

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3. Wheel position

The ideal is to overshape wheel virtual silhouette with the physical, always leaving a short distance between 3 and 6 cm. Bear in mind you have to accomplish the previous distance and height guidelines before and feel comfortable in your driving position.

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4. Seat

Check in your sim which options you have to calculate the height and the distance of the seat and the wheel. Mostly you got an approach with the previous steps.

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5. Sim parameters

Disable virtual representation of the driver hands and wheel.

6. Field of view

It is really important to understand what is happening before our eyes. Lastly every sim has its own FOV calculator that helps to set depending on the height and distance measures. When the FOV is wrong there is an tunnel effect that distorts the speed feeling and feedback. When you try to get a balance with one screen it is important not forget the vehicle sides. Usually iRacing sets a 78º degree FOV by default.

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7. Covering

Even with only one screen is advisable to get a cover. Its function is avoid every kind of distractions for our sight. Speed feeling is also better.

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8. Triple screens

Frames are important value to consider when you are setting a triple screen configuration. Try to get something with less than 10mm. To reduce this black strip you can overshape frames of the monitors.
To calculate angles of the triple screen there are different tools which with a few value inputs can show your ideal FOV, angle and distance to get the ideal configuration.

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9. Superfov

Big screens with projectors which wheel is very close to the main screen.
A big single screen has the problem due to the distance of our sight to distant points of the sides.
Three panels or curved panels don’t seem to have same problem if you use a software to correct the FOV.

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10. Virtual reality

Seems the next big thing. It promises a total immersion getting you into the game. Speed feeling and head tracking incorporated. In the con side, still in development, lost the physical limbs and fingers, not a human real FOV yet, not a big resolution yet, feeling sickness, etc.
We will hope the next DK3 will solve some of these issues.