Looking For Innovative Motion Simulator Ideas

Hello XSimulator community,

I'm a mechanical engineering student in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I'm working with a team of six on building a motion simulator for our senior design capstone project. We've spent lots of hours reading through various forums and build guides trying to gain as much wisdom as we can about motion simulators and we are so excited to embark on this project and contribute some ideas of our own!

There is one thing imparticular we could use your help with now in the current brainstorming/prototyping phase we are in. For our senior design project, it is required that we make it unique and accomplish something that wasn't done before or further improve upon something that hadn't been accomplished already. Essentially, this means we can't just follow step by step instructions on building a simulator, but rather we need to add some new ideas and improvements to our project to make it unique.

Because we are new to motion simulators, my questions is, what are some innovative ideas or improvements that you have been wanting to try or experiment with, or any ideas you have that could make our project unique and individual. Would love to hear any and all out of the box ideas!

It seems so ironic to ask if any one has any innovative ideas. So many people here have innovative ideas and they share them. Spending time in the forums will show you all sorts of innovation. No one is holding back ideas waiting until someone needs a new one for a school project.

Maybe as a team come up with some concepts or problems you think could be improved or tackled and ask questions about feasibility etc. then your project will contain innovations from your team. This way as well the community will benefit from your ideas and your project will benefit from the collective knowledge of the community in guiding you through past roadblocks etc.

What about a sim that floats on water !

Or one that sits on a tray of ball bearings and uses magnetic coils to move it

Reading the build threads on this site may limit your creativeness somewhat since you need to build something unique but its probably to late now. I built a 4dof (roll/sway axis, pitch/surge axis, heave axis and traction loss) over 5 years ago before finding this site and designed an improved simulator (imo) where I still have not seen all my ideas replicated. Good luck to you and your team.

I think anyone can always beats a good old idea with creativity.
Just an idea @jmoneyswag . "Necessity is the mother of invention". So, you can choose a part of a typical sim, think that you can't get it and think how you can substitute it for something new and better (piece of cake) .

A frame that hangs like a swing with motors placed underneath

I would like to see a pnematic sim

When I first found this forum and realised that extracting telemetry data from games was possible, my first thoughts towards designing a motion sim was along the lines of a gyroscope...

And additional actuator underneath for heave. But having read a LOT of threads detailing others builds I realise this isn't normally the way it's done. The closest you generally get to this is the joyrider designs.
On this website there are one, two and even three seater gyroscopes...
http://bestonkiddierides.com/orbitron-human-gyroscope-for-sale/

But I guess this type of design would be better suited to flight Sims!

Thank you all for your feedback! We've been doing lots and lots of forum reading coming up with ideas, so If you have any build guides or additional resources that would be of use, please send them my way!

We are currently looking at making our simulator unique by applying a significant amount of engineering mathematics and simulations to create an ideal physical model. We are experimenting with different size lever arms, motor placements, power requirements, materials, and much more as we hope to maximize our efficiency and minimize our cost. Good senior project stuff to make the professors happy!

Of course, we might be good at running simulations, but when it comes down to getting into the manufactoring and especially the electronics, we mechanical guys could use some help.

Anyways, stay tuned for updates!