Holy shit, I want thisfor playing EVE Online!!!
I think the ‘flight seat/cockpit’ aspect would be fantastic when paired up with the VR headset/headphones, very immersive. Especially if you can add in the impacts of weapons hits while in space combat =)
For those who don’t click the link, it’s basically an easy chair with a spherical bottom that fits into a matching base, that can swivel around every which way.
Eh, it can change the direction of the g vector you feel, but not its magnitude. Would that be enough to meaningfully increase immersion, or would it just produce an “uncanny valley” effect?
And what games work with it?
I’ve been in flight simulators that tilt to simulate g forces, like Mission to Mars and Star Tours at Disney World. They are immersive enough that I know to never do them again when I have sinus congestion. 
I think one reason they work is that you combine tilting with the visual illusion that you are moving, and that only works if you can’t see the static living room around you. Using this with a VR setup like aruvqan suggests should work the same way.
Oh my that sounds unpleasant …
Eve on line has been under several days of a DDOS attack.
You will get a sense of magnitude of G-force based on how much you tilt. There’s an obvious limit of less than a full g, but a 30 degree tilt can give you 0.5g and probably not require seatbelts. Tilting less will give you proportionately less sense of acceleration.
I’ve used motion simulators with less axes of movement than that chair (the ones I used had no rotation, just tilting) and I can confirm that in a racing simulator, it’s extremely immersive, especially if you can remove external visual cues. A VR headset is icing on the cake, but a triple-monitor setup worked well enough that I was pretty wrapped up in the experience.
I know from personal experience that you could incorporate this into iRacing with relatively minimal difficulty if you can do a little C++ coding. Mostly for personal amusement, I programmed my own instrument cluster out of an old display from a Logitech G15 keyboard. iRacing provides almost all of your car’s telemetry in realtime, so you can measure the car’s g-forces and rotation and transmit that to your rotato-chair with minimal difficulty, as long as the chair came with a decent codebase to work from as well.
Oh, it is. My first and only time on Mission to Mars, I barely got through without barfing, and had to sit for a while (then I went to an Epcot country, I think maybe China?, where there was a huge 360 surround movie that got it all going again for me).
Been playing EVE off and on for a dozen years, that happens every couple years or so. I think the longest I had experienced was 13 days.
My perfectly ordinary chair gives me 1 g. Tilting 30º would give me 1 g. Turning over completely sideways while playing Yankee Doodle over loudspeakers would give me 1 g. There’s nothing this chair could do that would give you more nor less.
And to the folks saying that it’s so immersive that it causes motion sickness, that’s probably actually evidence of the opposite. Motion sickness occurs when your brain gets mismatched signals from the motion sensors in your ears and from your eyes. This can be because something is wrong with one of those sensor systems (that’s why it makes you nauseous, because that’s a symptom of some sorts of poisoning), or it can be because you’re just not getting the right inputs to one of those systems.
It doesn’t matter what it’s actually doing. It simulates the feeling of being in a moving vehicle pretty well. It’s not the actual g forces acting on you that creates the illusion, but the change in those g forces while synchronized with a visual cue telling your brain that you are moving. It’s a pretty neat trick.
It’s the same motion sickness you might get from a roller coaster. I’ve never gotten off a roller coaster and complained that it didn’t feel immersive enough. Those “mismatched signals” are what you might feel naturally when you are in a vehicle changing its vector dramatically.
Remember how I said it was when I had sinus problems? That is because the congestion screws with your sense of equilibrium. My sensory problem wasn’t due to the technological equipment, it was my biological equipment at fault. I didn’t get similar nausea when I did those things at a different time while feeling healthy.
To put it another way… When I was experiencing that congestion I had no nausea sitting normally. No nausea walking around, or riding a bus. But getting onto a fast park ride made me sick, and those simulators also made me sick the same way. To me that’s some pretty faithful (but unfortunate) immersion.
I also learned what not to do if I get similarly sick at Disney World. 
Not impressed, chair jockeys, unless your chair actually catches fire when you are “hit” and you have to literally eject from the chair to save your lives! 
Speaking as someone who regularly spends a bit of time in a full motion flight simulator I can say that it is closer to “uncanny valley” than increased immersion. As you say, it can only ever give you one g.
Done well, a motion seat like in the OP could be quite good, but it would depend on the programmers having an excellent understanding of how human balance works and how machines like racing cars and airplanes actually feel when operated outside the envelope of what most people have experienced.
For example, to simulate a very steep turn in an airplane, you don’t bank the simulator at all other than very small movements that fool the brain into thinking a bank has been initiated. When established in the turn, the g forces should be straight down through the body, just like if you’re sitting in an office chair. The difference is that in the real plane the g forces are multiplied by 2 or more (2 for a 60° banked turn), but increasing g force is something a simulator just can’t do. The one big factor that distinguishes a simple steep turn in an airplane is beyond the capabilities of any simulator. However gentle “airline” turns can be simulated quite well.
A racing car entering a corner at speed will force the driver to the outside of the turn with a force of around 4 gs, again there is no way for any simulator to replicate this. The best it can do is roll to the side to simulate a sideways force, but there is a problem, established in a left turn the simulator cockpit would be banked to the right, but the process of banking the simulator to the right would feel off. So again, the factor that distinguishes a simple turn in a racing car can not be replicated.
All is not lost though, there are a couple of ways to go. You can say that the general public don’t know what it feels like to drive a formula 1 car or fly a fighter jet so it doesn’t have to feel real, it just needs to meet their unrealistic expectations. Or, instead of trying to simulate the big moves, you go for the little things, the rumble of the tarmac under the car, the little bumps etc that make you feel attached to the road. Likewise with airplanes, simulate the little bits of turbulence, flying through the enemy’s wake, the thud of the guns etc.
In my opinion the latter would be a lot more immersive than the former but wouldn’t look nearly as impressive to an outside observer.
Right. Technically right–the most correct form of right my wife would remind me.
You will agree, I hope (or our friendly conversation is going to be beyond my skill) that a 30 degree tilt would give you–relative to the chair–.5 g sideways, and roughly .86 g through the chair’s down axis. If your eyes are open, and you’re aware of your surroundings, you’re not going to be fooled. The tilting is only part of the equation to get this to work right, and the other part is getting you to ignore your environs.
A VR headset works amazingly for this. A triple-bank of monitors (as is common for racing sims, with which I’m familiar) has been sufficient for me. It takes full concentration, after all.
If you’re now ignoring visual cues, the “downward” axis is essentially impalpable. You’re always aware of it. You’ll only really feel it in extreme circumstances, like bottoming out or cresting a hill at speed. It can be safely ignored. You will not notice the difference between 1g at 0 degrees or the ~.86 g at 30 degrees, unless your backside is more sensitive tha mine. That .5 g sideways, you will notice, and without visual cues to tell you that you’re leaning, instead of rotating, you can’t tell the difference. It feels the same.
I can’t address most of Richard Pearson’s points, as my experience lies strictly in racing cars, mostly simulated. The people who do iRacing have done an excrutatingly large amount of work in making the cars behave realistically, enough so that it’s best to call it a simulation, not a game.
I had actually gone at really tedious length about the mechanics of the car’s behaviour versus the magic chair’s leaning conveys a realistic experience, and then thought better of it and deleted it. I’ll retype it if there’s interest*, but what I really wanted to express is that capable drivers use their sense of balance to keep their cars as close to the limit of grip as they dare, and any simulator that can trigger your primal balance reflex will do an excellent job of feeling realistic.
Naturally, you won’t get the 5g of a formula one car, but you’d have to be masochistic or really young and in astonishingly amazing physical shape to endure this for more than a minute anyway. The cars I commonly raced produced well less than a g in hard cornering, and fractional g conveys this feeling well enough.
So to summarize, really, it’s not the magnitude of the force that matters, it’s the direction of it–so long as you can remove or suppress the visual cues that tell you you’re leaning instead of rotating.