Back in 2010, Lexus America made sensation with the video below, where the company shows to the American the world largest car simulator!

And today, well last week actually, we at AkihabaraNews among some other selected journalist around the world had the chance to get our very own test, well short test behind the wheel of this amazing piece of technology!

To put things into perspective, this simulator host a scale 1:1 Car here a Lexus LS Series mounted on a turntable and located within a dome of 7.1m of diameter where Toyota installed none the less than 8 video projectors offering you a 360 degree vision on a 1600×1200 resolution allowing you to recognize any car located 100m ahead of you.
This dome, which includes our car, is mounted on vibration actuator and a tilt system, similar to the ones found on a Full Flight Simulator used by airlines with the difference here is that this overall setting, the dome, is mounted on a motion system allowing you any movement within 35m high and 20m wide.
Not only you will get a real visual representation of Toyota City or any test track used by Toyota, but this simulator will also provides a faithful simulation of the actual sensation of driving including velocity and acceleration up to 0.5G

Saying that this setting is huge is a real understatement, here as well the comparison of being in one of NASA’s latest Test center is not far fetch and actually I am pretty sure that even NASA would love to get such toys for them as well!

YouTube Embedded Version

As you would have guess, each and every little things within this simulator is recorder and monitored to not only check both the driver and the car behavior but also for the safety of the simulator occupant. Staff within the control center has real feedback of what’s going on writhing the car and live video of its occupant in order to check everyone’s reaction to certain test.

Here as well the comparison between a NASA Shuttle Simulator or an Airbus/Boeing FFS is not an understatement, and having the chance to have logged 30 minutes on a A320 FFS in my youth I can tell you that this Toyota Simulator is in fact even better thanks to its translation Motion system.
If you put aside the video generated environment you will feel absolutely not difference between driving a real car or being in the simulator.
Only limited to 0.5G you can’t expect however to improve your drifting skill, but it will give you some pretty impressive result and emergency stop feedback for example!
No really there is nothing to complain about this simulator and it does an amazing job to re-create real driving experience, but we have to remember that despite being an amazing piece of technology, Toyota still heavily continue to test its cars and other features on their own tracks, and that this simulator is merely there to study driver behaviors in stressing environment, studying fatigue, analysis of driving characteristics and development of active safety technologies as well as verifying the effectiveness of such technology in a 100% controlled environment and in total safety.

Big Thumbs-up to Beno-San (Image-Japan) who helped to cover this event!