Trainees (or tourists, these days) climb into a recreation of a tank cockpit, featuring all the controls you’d find in the real thing, which sits atop a motorized base that can move the cockpit around in all directions. When looking out the tiny front window of the tank, the driver doesn’t see the real world, but a screen displaying a live video feed from a tiny camera that explores a nearby miniature recreation of the rolling countryside, with the camera’s movements controlled by the tank cockpit.
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The simulator is a marvel of brute force engineering, but it’s the small things that help really sell the effect that the person in the tank cockpit is really in control and driving a full-size vehicle. The moving camera is housed inside a blue shroud that moves along with it so that what’s seen over the horizon in the video feed always looks like blue sky. And beneath the tiny camera is a small pivoting foot that slides along the smooth roadways in the miniature model, but pivots up and down when traversing rougher terrain, like logs, with those motions being translated to the tank’s cockpit in real-time.
It took the museum over two years to rebuild the retired tank simulator and get it working again, and while it still uses the original video gear, including the tiny camera that was probably a marvel of engineering back in the ‘70s, its computer control system had to be completely replaced with, unbelievably, a $35 Raspberry Pi.