My favourite hackers are the ones who do it for fun. I don't imagine he has any aspirations of being acquired by Google. He does it because he loves it.
That layout never fails to impress me. So detailed it has miniature traffic accidents, miniature bank robberies, and one time I think I saw a miniature terrorist incident.
Would anyone happen to know the requirements for simulators built for flight training use? You need quite a few hours on the simulator before you can really get to work on your pilot's license, renting the thing out during work hours to certified flight instructors/schools during the day would be a hell of a side business.
If you need something FAA certified, it's going to cost you a whole lot more than a non-certified one. X-Plane flight sim is available with certification for flight instruction use. It costs more than the desktop version.
For a private pilot's licence you're not required to have any sim time, but it's a very good idea anyway. But if you just want to practice your upcoming flying lesson with an instructor in a real airplane, pretty much any modern flight simulator is good enough for basic training. Off the shelf gaming controllers are good enough. You don't need a certified sim for that.
For commercial pilots flying passenger jets, there are big simulators that are different beasts.
The full motion simulators they have a picture of are intense; they feel like the real thing in motion, in controls (weighted and worn like the real thing), and in sound. I was lucky enough to try one for a C-130 last year, and I'm still a bit blown away by it.
Last I remember, the FAA doesn't certify software. A certified simulator is a hardware installation. There's really nothing specific required of the software; early "certified" simulators were just instrument gauges and a trivially simple flight model. There are some FlightGear-based training devices too.
It may be that you need a certification for each hardware installation separately. However, there are software requirements for FAA certification. This is from X-Plane Professional description: "It provides hardware and frame-rate checks required for FAA certification of the simulator".
The video was a letdown - all that talking and not one detail about how it was put together (other than the part about it being a boeing nose cone, but that was obvious).
Considering the praise he heaps on the EPIC input controller, the website for that product (http://www.mindspring.com/~rrelect/epic/info/teaser.shtml) is, dare I say it, almost epically underwhelming. :| I tried to find out a) what it looks like and b) how much it costs, just out of general interest, and failed on both.
I was really hoping he'd detail what exactly he'd put together on the technical side: what was bought off the shelf, what did he create himself etc... Hopefully more details will show up online. It's a very impressive project
I wonder after 3 years of work on something like this how do you protect and/or insure it from fire or mischief as only one example? Security wise seems to be an issue making something like this so public (although I can certainly understand why you would want to show what you have built.)
He uses Flight Simulator 2002 via networked machines for each screen!... I'm surprised he couldn't get one rig to run all the screens now. Really impressive setup.
He might need proprietary software to power his cockpit, and that might not be available for newer versions of Flight Simulator (w/ multi screen support).
Jokes aside that's a pretty sweet setup, I'd like to see one for driving a car or flying a helicopter.