At universal studios in Hollywood they have a Simpson Ride where you sit in a mock up of a car that doesn’t ever really move from that spot. It is a motion simulator. The walls of the room fall away and you end up in front of a huge IMAX screen. The “movie” plays and you feel like you are on a roller coaster ride. There are drops, turns, stops, etc.
My question is how a motion simulator like this can simulate a long drop. Do they just tilt the car more and more to make you feel like you are accelerating down? Because we clearly aren’t dropping more than a foot or two in the car while on the ride. From the car I was in, I could see the other cars in front of the screen and I could see they weren’t moving much, but sitting in my car it sure felt like we were moving a lot more.
Yup. Mostly they just tilt it a bit further. Your brain tends to take the flood of visual cues and fills in the gaps to make you think your are actually moving.
In a flight simulator, tipping backwards puts the same force on your body as horizontal acceleration, and tipping forwards is the same as horizontal deceleration. But there’s no way to simulate extended free-fall, that must be just visual clues, perhaps with jolts at top and bottom to disorient you.
When they were testing the IMAX (one of the first) at Ontario Place dome in Toronto, one of the first dignitaries to be subjected to it was Indira Ghandi, on a state visit. She apparently got motion sickness during the roller-coaster sequence (with NO seat motion) so when the Queen was through they took out that part.
It’s amazing how good the cues are… in a sequence where you are “dangling from a rope on a Cliffside, looking down” as the camera spins you swear you are spinning too. The people who developed IMAX determined that high resolution, high frame rate so the flicker/strobe effect is not visible, and a picture all the way to peripheral vision - combine to make the brain believe what it is seeing. Add in enough motion to reinforce what the eye sees and the brain is doubly convinced.
Of course, you won’t really feel what you would if dropping, but add enough visual and physical cues and you brain fills in the rest.
That’s why she got motion sickness. It’s caused by a mismatch between visual and inertial cues: If you’re moving (more precisely, accelerating) but viewing something that’s not moving relative to you (like the inside of a car), or if you’re not moving but viewing something that is (like the image on an IMAX screen), you’ll get sick.
We don’t actually *see *very much of what we think we see. We only process a small part of the scene around us, and our brains fill in the rest. Try the selective attention testas an example.
I read something once about the way human memory typically works - we build “scripts” and are quite likely to fill in details from experience. I went to the store, so I must have driven this route, parked where I usually park, gone in that door that I usually go in… I must have paid with this card ecause that’s what I do. Many of these details we do not specifically remember unless there are interesting details so they stand out, our brain fills them in from the standard template of actions.I went through the lineup for chatty Brenda the cashier; I don’t remember what she talked about, but she must have because she always starts a conversation. (Unless we remember the odd bit that today she was very quiet…)
This is why eye-witness testimony can be very unreliable. Your brain fills in the blanks for you.
My favorite example of how memory works: You’ve all seen plenty of pennies, right? You know exactly what they look like. So tell me: Is Lincoln facing to the left or to the right?
To the right. I know this because I’m always reminded of when Itchy drops a penny off of the space needle trying to hit scratchy. But I understand your point, I needed that other bit of random simpsons trivia to figure out your bit of trivia.
The visual clues in the movie are definitely a huge part of the ride. One time I rode it normally, then jumped back on and rode again with my eyes closed the entire time - I actually thought the ride was broken, since it seemed to hardly be moving at all. My kids said it was exactly the same as the previous ride.
When I play a video game, such as Just Cause or Borderlands, and my character jumps off a cliff, I get a very real sense of falling, too. And that’s just from a visual. I think the key is to get the rate of acceleration just right; it really does feel real.
Now add in dropping your seat just an inch or two a second, and you have a pretty convincing ride for the average brain.