Dynisma: The ultra realistic driving simulators training F1’s biggest stars

“There’s nothing really else out there that compares to this…. It’s the closest to real life you can get without actually going out on track in a car.“

Imagine being able to race round all the world’s top Formula One circuits and feel every bump and bit of understeer without actually having to travel anywhere. Or to be able to test drive a road car that  hasn’t been built yet on the motorway. Dynisma creates driving simulators that make this possible. Founded by ex-F1 engineer Ash Warne, Dynisma develops incredibly realistic driving simulators for both motorsport teams and the car industry.  What sets their simulators apart though is how quickly they respond, in milliseconds, so drivers feel like they’re driving a real car.

Our presenter (and motor racing fan) Paul Haimes joined Ash in Dynisma’s office in Somerset to learn more about how they build state of the art simulators - and to have a test drive in their flagship DMG-1 model simulator. Paul drives the DMG-1 around the famous Spa Francorchamps F1 circuit, guided around by junior Aston Martin driver Tom Canning, to feel the responsiveness and realism of the simulator.

Ash also takes us around their manufacturing site to see the simulators in construction, and tells us about how incredibly accurate simulators can help motorsport teams and manufacturers cut down on travel and plan for a greener future. We also hear from Jon Hirschtick at PTC, who tells us about how OnShape’s cloud-based system can help Dynisma engineers to be more collaborative and get to the cutting edge of simulation.

Find out more about Dynisma here.

Find out more about OnShape here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

Third Angle is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou and Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Hannah Dean. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, and we’re getting in the driving seat – but where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

I’m your host, Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. 

There was a time when you were most likely to come across a driving simulator in an arcade or at a theme park. But in recent years, the world’s top automotive manufacturers and racing teams have been increasingly relying on them to train drivers, as well as enhance ride experience in the car design process. The simulators that Dynisma has built are so advanced,and have pushed the boundaries of driving simulation so much, that more traditional simulators just don’t cut it anymore. It’s all to do with an obsessive attention to detail, engineering and experience so that the human body and the human mind find it very difficult to tell the difference from the real thing. For Formula One drivers, for instance, every split second counts, and so, by reducing the latency of the simulator to just a few milliseconds, they can perfect their reaction speeds and access the impact of upgrades to keep one step ahead of the competition. And this is just one of the ways in which Dynisma are changing the face of simulation and have no doubt helped some of the biggest names in motor racing onto the podium. Now, as a huge motor racing fan, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try out one of Dynisma’s simulators myself. So I went along to their HQ in Somerset to meet Ash Warne, Founder, CEO and chief engineer – and, of course, put my driving skills to the test. 

Well, I’ve just stepped into Dynisma just outside Bristol, and I’m here today now to have a go in their Nine Degree of Freedom motion simulator. And with me today is Ash Warne, who looks after the setup here, so he’s going to be my tutor and my guide, and hopefully keep me out of the barriers.

Okay, cool. So here we are. This is DMG1, this is our demonstrator. We’re going to give you an experience of a motorsport scenario today. So we’ve got an F1 car model, and we’re going to send you to Spa. We’ve got Tom Canning here, and he should be able to talk you around the track, the gears, etc. and get you up to speed quickly. And what we’re really looking for here is for you to be able to feel some of the unique capabilities of this system – in particular the bandwidth, the latency, how you can really feel what the car is doing, and how quickly the simulator is able to provide that feedback to you such as, for example, if you get the back end stepping out, you’re really able to feel that immediately and respond to it and catch the slide, whereas in other simulators you might just spin out.

I don’t suppose you have a Formula 3 model here, have you? I used to drive those years ago. Not that it would make any difference. 

You’ll get up to speed very quickly, I’m sure. Just brake a bit later, go a bit faster. 

Just the left, go, flat out. Really good. So now remember, it’s flat out all the way until the last straight.

So Dynisma develops driving simulators for automotive and motorsport markets. So a driving simulator is a tool that is used predominantly to develop a car, whether that’s a road car or a race car. And ultimately, what we’re trying to do is to recreate the experience of being in a real car as accurately as possible. But critically, a simulator is able to adapt. So one minute or in one incarnation it could be an SUV, then it could be an EV, then it could be a saloon, and then it can be a race car. So it’s important in driving simulation to be able to evaluate different setups. And this is ultimately what their value is – to be able to try things out without having to go and build the physical thing and build a prototype. You’re able to take an idea directly from a piece of paper into a mathematical model that encapsulates what’s going on, put it in the simulator, and the driver can drive it, or in an autonomous vehicle scenario, perhaps just experience it and provide feedback to the developer, whether they arean automotive manufacturer or a motorsport company. And of course, the environment is all simulated, so you can quickly go from the glamorous location of driving around Monaco to being stuck in traffic on the M40. 

So what really drove me to leave the world of F1 and set up my own business was really the desire to create something. I had many ideas and I could visualise what was possible, but I wasn’t always able to go and do that within the confines of a large business of a team, for example. So I struck out in 2017, and founded Dynisma. I had a vision of what should be possible in terms of the capabilities of the technology that weren’t there and weren’t being offered by competing products at the time. So I set about modelling, designing, and within a year had come up with a prototype that demonstrated all of the unique capabilities that we still see in our products today.

 I’m Tom Canning. I’m a racing driver for Aston Martin and I worked with Dynisma on the development side. And I was just working with Paul then, talking around the lap around Spain the Formula One car. During my racing career, I’ve driven quite a lot of simulators and there’s nothing really else out there that compares to this, you just get so much feeling through your backside. It’s the closest to real life you can get without actually going out and tracking a car.

 Okay, Paul, how did that feel? 

 Amazing, it felt awesome, ultra-realistic. And then the actual way the back of the car starts to move and step out, and the loading on the curves. Yes, fantastic. Really, really, really realistic stuff. So brilliant. Thank you. 

 Yes, I saw you catch some oversteer, some slides, you’re really dialled in there.

 So just to explain to our listeners what we’re actually looking at here at Dynisma with the demonstrator. We’ve got what is a regular racing car monocoque that is supported by six arms and gives it the six degrees of freedom that you require. But then that is in turn mounted on a table, a plinth, which is also able to move in three degrees of freedom. And that gives you the nine degrees of freedom total there. And then wrapped around that we’ve got a huge screen, with five projectors projecting the full field of view for the driver in fantastic reality, in terms of the detail that you’re looking at, not just of the scenery and everything else, but the inside of the vehicle that we’re driving as well. So there is a huge amount going on here. It’s a very, very complex environment. But all comes together to provide an unbelievably realistic driving experience.

 I think that’s one of the really unique things about driving simulators that you just touched on there, is the fact that they are firstly very complex systems. So there are tens of computers and CPUs and graphics cards all working together to produce this cohesive simulated environment. But it’s also the sheer number of cues and stimuli that we’re providing. The idea here is to convince probably the most complex thing in the universe, i.e. the human, that they’re engaged in some other activity. And they’re doing that in a very serious fashion and giving accurate feedback to steer the development of road cars and race cars. So it’s important that we model what the person sees, what they feel, and what they hear as well. 

 Our unique selling points really focus on the high bandwidth and the low latency and the smoothness of our simulators. And these correspond basically to, first of all, bandwidth, it’s the amount of information that you can get through the system. So if the analogy was television, then we’re 8K whereas other simulators are standard definition. It’s about putting higher fidelity, higher frequencies through the motion generator, as we call it. To put some numbers on it, many of our competitors have a bandwidth of 20 hertz, whereas we are 50,and even in excess of 100 hertz on different systems. And what this means is that vibrations,movements, that you feel in a real car are able to be accurately transmitted through our motion generator, and therefore given to the participant in the simulator study using the Dynisma simulator, whereas in other simulators, they tend to feel muffled, filtered, you miss some of the harshness that you can get in reality, and then the higher frequencies including vibration and noise. 

The second USP is low latency, so we have a latency of between three and five milliseconds. So what this means is that within three to five milliseconds of the vehicle model calculating some movement that needs to be transmitted to the driver, we can measure it using an accelerometer on our motion platform that that movement has happened. So this is, again, an order of magnitude better than many of our competitors – and the motorsport example is really what sets us apart because it allows the driver to drive the car on the limit as they’re able to in reality, whereas in other simulators you find that if you try to correlate the balance of the car, i.e. how understeering or oversteering it is, you end up with a car that its back end slides out, but you can’t catch it because the simulator doesn’t respond quickly enough, and therefore the driver gets the cue to correct too late – they’ve already spun out. So what you tend to find in other simulators is that you lose correlation because you have to dial understeer into the balance of the car just to get it around the lap. Whereas in our simulator, we’re able to have a very unstable oversteered car balance where the driver is absorbing the wheel, keeping it in a straight line as they’re braking and turning and sliding into the corner. This is something you can’t do in other simulators. 

The final USP that I’ve mentioned is just the smoothness of our motion systems. Drivers have described it as feeling a lot more like the real car. And that’s no mistake, really – we took design cues from how vehicle suspension worked in developing motion simulators. Whereas typically, other technologies are based on perhaps flight simulators, where high frequency really isn’t as important.

 So Ash, tell me a little bit about the head-mounted display and how that enables you to offer the mixed reality environment for the simulator.

Yes, sure. So obviously, Paul, what you’ve just driven is the projector-based visuals. So this is typically how it’s been done in driving simulators for a long time. What we’ve been able to do is implement a Varjo head-mounted display in our simulator, and this replaces the projectors. This allows you to feel a far greater sense of immersion. You can see your hands in the mixed reality context, you can see the steering wheel in front of you. And yet that’s augmented with the graphical environment around you. I think, uniquely, what we’ve been able to do is to get the system working in a motion simulator. So despite the fact that the chassis is moving and shaking around to provide you all of those cues of what the vehicle is doing, we’re still able to keep track of where the headset is and correctly present to you both the graphical world and the real world within the cockpit.

 We’re now here at Dynisma’s manufacturing site. So we’re just stepping into what is one of the larger units here where all the engineering takes place, and so forth. So if we just step inside, and then we can get started having a look around.

So the guys are just building up the ground system here, this is a really important part of the low transfer to ground. So our systems are very responsive, high bandwidth, as I’ve mentioned, and this requires a great deal of stiffness. So hence you can see some really solid structures here.The sort of strength and the size and the weight of this chassis, I guess, is all part of making sure that nothing moves that shouldn’t move.

Yes. And in simulator parlance, “nothing moves that shouldn’t move” would be “eliminating miscues”. So we’re in the business of creating cues, feelings, for the driver, for the passenger, that correspond to the situation that you’re trying to simulate. And what we’re doing, and I think what we specialise in, and I think we do better than our competitors, is eliminating those miscues – the bangs, cracks, whistles and grinds that often appear on other simulators.

 We should also touch on sustainability. And the fact that what we’re doing with simulation means less models are being used, less materials are being used, less manufacturing time, lessgreenhouse gas – this is all part of a more sustainable future for manufacturers in all industries.

Absolutely. Yes, more simulation means fewer prototypes, which means fewer prototype miles. The more that can be done virtually, the fewer emissions are being generated. One of the big contributors is having to take prototypes all over the world in order to assess them in different environments. And the more that can be virtualized and simulated offline, the fewer prototypes there are shipping around the world to all of these extreme environments for example.

 That was Ash Warne, Founder, CEO and Chief Engineer at Dynisma. Now the team there use technology, physics and engineering and fine-tune it to work in harmony with the human body so that the motion cues are perfectly aligned to the vision, the sound and the feeling from the simulator. One of the tools that helped them to do this is PTC’s cloud-native design and PLM solutions Onshape and Arena connected. Time to meet our expert, PTC’s EVP Jon Hirschtick, who can tell us more. Now, Jon, I was fortunate to spend time at Dynisma, and the first thing that struck me was the sheer size of the simulators on offer. I’ve seen a number of simulators offering the nine degrees of freedom movement, which is typical today, but never one that was capable of carrying such a high payload – anything up to 750 kilogrammes. And this means that they can simulate the whole vehicle cabin with multiple participants, not just the single driver monocoque that we often see with racing simulators. Now, because of that, the Dynisma offering is in high demand – not just from the world of motorsport, but also some of the world’s biggest car makers who are now keen to use the simulators to test-drive concept cars before they enter production. Now, they needed a design and a PLM solution that could scale up quickly and were compelled to switch to PTC’s cloud native Onshape and Arena, connected. Now, Jon, are you able to give an overview of what that means from a solution perspective and how Dynisma can capitalise on it?

 Happy to. Onshape and Arena together provide unique value to Dynisma, and many other companies around the world, because we are the only cloud-native CAD PDM and PLM solution in the world. And what this means is we help companies deploy agile process to design, test, produce and manufacture products on a faster, more agile basis than they could ever do before. And it comes from several key aspects of the unique cloud native Onshape and Arena CAD, PDM, PLM solution. First, they’re connected in the cloud. This means that our connection will synchronise the CAD, PDM and PLM across engineers, manufacturers, suppliers – instantaneous sharing of product design information, so that there’s essentially a global, real-time single source of truth. All your internal teams and your manufacturing partners are perfectly in sync. And when it comes time to add a new partner, that happens instantly. Much like the responsiveness of a Dynisma simulator, which I understand is amazing because it’s down to milliseconds, when you’re adding a new supplier or a new team member with Arena PLM, you don’t have to wait hours or days for them to be onboarded and installed and what have you – you click a few buttons for instant access to the cloud. We see collaboration as being vital, it’s the name of the game in today’s world of modern product development, and it’s vital to Dynisma. Their designers and engineers, they need to be able to see what each other is doing, to run through different ideas, tweak them in real time, so they can see in moments what the other team members are working on. Being in the cloud, not just in the cloud, or using cloud, but cloud-native, means that everyone involved can get the information they need, anywhere in the world – it’s an extremely efficient way of logging any changes. Dynisma is pushing the boundaries of innovation in terms of simulators, and to achieve their level of performance – the level of state-of-the-art,down to the millisecond Formula One – we feel they need a state-of-the-art, high-performance, CAD PDM and PLM that Arena and Onshape offer. 

We’re a SaaS, cloud-native design, development, manufacturing supply chain platform. We’re robust, we’re usable out of the box, but you can tailor us to meet specific requirements very easily. And when you make modifications, everyone in the world, as you customise your system, you’re not worried about upgrading and admins and all that – it happens instantly for everyone around the globe. So we’re super excited to be part of the Dynisma story in thisstage of growth. I’m jealous that you got a chance to try out the simulator – I’m hoping I get to do it myself. And I think that I really see an exciting analogue between Dynismasimulating the twists and turns of modern racing at the highest possible speed and Arena and Onshape, giving them the PLM CAD and PDM tools, so their team can work at the highest possible speed and take the turns fast as they come up in product development. So I’m delighted to have Dynisma as a customer of cloud-native Arena and Onshape from PTC.