Emirates is the launch customer for an entirely new simulator visual system, developed over the past eight years in a closely-held program, by Evans & Sutherland. The airline's new CAE simulators—two A380s and an A340-600—will be fitted with E&S's new LaserWide projector. The new technology offers greater image quality combined with lower life-cycle costs, says E&S CEO James Oyler, and the company expects to update many simulators worldwide with the new technology. Ultimately, too, it could lead to brighter, sharper movie pictures.
Most air transport simulators today use three CRT projectors to produce the outside visual scene. They have to be aligned and adjusted regularly to eliminate discontinuities or differences in brightness, and the life of the high-power CRTs is limited.
LaserWide uses a single three-color laser projector modulated by a patented "grating light valve"—essentially, a controllable diffraction grating based on micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. The valve produces a vertical column of pixels that is reflected on to the screen by a scanning mirror. This technology makes it possible to cover an angle of more than 200° with a single light source. LaserWide does not need adjustments, uses mostly solid-stage components and beats CRTs in color, saturation and focus.
Emirates' simulators should be operational in mid-2006. The first applications for LaserWide, apart from flight simulation, will be planetariums. However, says Oyler, the system has inherent advantages over the digital mirror technology used in some movie theaters—notably, it can handle 32 million pixels, versus 1.2 million for today's projectors.
