I never installed a videogame in my computer (except a very simple chess game), and I never owned a video console, so I don’t have any experience in this field.
Till now the only practical application of videogames into motorbike racing that I knew is the fact that some riders use to play with a video game console to have a first impression of those tracks they never have ridden before.
Some days ago I discovered a second, and surprising, possibility of some nowadays videogames.
I was searching for information about MOTEC engine management and data adquisition systems that can be used in cars or motorbikes, when I saw that there were more than 400.000 references in Google, most of them refered to videogames. After some clicks more I realized that there are some car “videogames” (probably it is better to call them simulators), that are able to generate files with “telemetry” data of the car behaviour in the game.
The simulator generates data files in the same way that a real telemetry system, with channels like suspensions, tyre temperatures, speeds, throttle, rpm, etc.
The most interesting thing is that you can go to the MOTEC official webpage and download their proffesional data interpretation software, and use it to analize your virtual car behaviour exactly in the same way that a proffesional telemetrist analizes the data of his real racing car. This kind of software provides a lot of analysis possibilites, and you have even the possibility of exporting the data to very powerful analysis tools like MATLAB.
This simulator is called GTR2 and it is the most real racing car simulator that you can find nowadays in the videogames market.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZm7tA2RM1E[/youtube]
This kind of simulators is based in very complex numeric simulations of phisical models. GRT2 takes into account a lot of variables like climatic conditions, tyres wear, or even the changes in the car behaviour as long as the fueltank is beeing empty. It is possible to adjust a lot of the parameters (tyres pressure, each suspension in an independent way, etc), and check through the telemetry how every change affects the car handling. From a technical training point of veiw, I think it is something really interesting, with a lot of possibilities.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADaElu6e3-8[/youtube]
By the moment I think that there is not avaliable a motorbike simulator with this quality and these telemetry features. I hope that something will appear soon.. for sure that it will be the first videogame that I will install in my computer!
[tags]simulation, videogames, telemetry, motec, gtr2[/tags]