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One Per Cent: A New Scientist Blog

Gaming chair mimics a full-motion simulator

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent


(Image: Greg Pease/Getty)

Multi-million-dollar full-motion flight simulators give trainee pilots a good approximation of the ups and downs of real flight, but the powerful hydraulic rams they are mounted on make them far too big, expensive and dangerous for the home. Gamers should take heart, though: a novel kind of gaming chair called a haptic seat might one day bring them at least some of the sensations of a full-motion simulator.

The idea is predicated on the fact that motion produces certain force effects on your body - you are pressed down into the armrests of your seat as a helicopter, say, moves upwards. So Fabien Danieau of Technicolor in Rennes, France, and colleagues at the nearby INRIA lab reasoned that a chair with armrests and a headrest that can reproduce these effects, in tandem with the strong reinforcing visuals on screen, could mimic complex motion sensations.

To test the idea, they rigged up a chair in which a headrest and two armrests were each moved independently by a commercial game controller called a Novint Falcon which has a strong force-feedback capability. They then wrote simulation software that uses the Novint system to move the armrests up slightly to make you feel you are dropping - and vice versa. Moving one armrest more than the other, meanwhile, makes users feel they are rolling to one side. Push the headrest forward a tad and you'll feel you've slowed down quickly - or pull it back a bit and you'll feel your head is being dragged back by acceleration.

All three units can be moved at once to provide more complex motion sensations like rolling as speed changes, too. In tests, the team let 17 volunteers try out the system: they reported a "realistic sensation of self motion". The plan now is to extend the number of actuators to boost believability: "The prototype could be extended by adding more points of stimulation, for instance, for the legs," the team say in their paper.

The jury-rigged system they put together looks odd, with the force-feedback units mounted on a steel frame surrounding the chair, but the idea is that the tech could one day be built invisibly into a commercial gaming chair "to simulate a sensation of motion in a consumer environment". There are other ideas that could be built into future chairs, too: creepy chair-back vibrators that introduce spine-tingling effects are in development by Disney, for instance. The team presented their work at a conference on virtual reality in Toronto, Canada, last week.

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Really nice trick. How quickly could a cheap home version be released by hacking the multi actuator fully ajustable chairs, or even reprogramming the microcontrollers?

If small motions are used, how about bladders in various places.


Acceleration and deceleration are the wrong way round. The headrest moving backwards would simulate slowing down and vice versa.


Steve, this is not correct. Think about driving in a car or going on a rollercoaster. If you accelerate, you are pushed back into the seat. If you brake, you are pushed forwards, hence the likelyhood of sailing through the car windscreen if you don't wear your seatbelt...

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