I have another PC mod story for later in the week, in the meantime the setup this guy has to play Elite: Dangerous is nothing if not worthy of a look.

Elite: Dangerous is a space exploration game, and, if you can believe it, takes place in a galaxy that is a 1:1 scale of our own Milky Way, and it uses procedural generation (meaning the content is generated by the software, not pre-supplied by the developers/designers) to create its planets and stars and whatnot.

In order to experience it to its full potential, one player in Germany dedicated a whole room and a whole lot of technology to re-creating, sort of, a whole cockpit. You can see it in the image above, and the incredible way it works in the video below.

This story was originally on Polygon, and I have lifted the list of hardware he’s using directly from their site, so all credit to them for the list which, in all fairness, they took from the original YouTube video. I added the links, however, because I’m just that kind of guy. Here’s the list:

• Projectors : 3 x TH681 BenQ Full HD 3D DLP
• Touch interface : Selfmade dashboard with 3 Treckstor Ventos 10.1 SurfTabs, Software: Roccat Power Grid
• Voice Commands : Voice Attack Software with Voice Feedback
• Head Tracker: TrackIR (passive rear )
• Gesture recognition : not active in this video: LeapMotion controller
• HOTAS Joystick: Saitek X52 Pro
• Keyboard: Logitech G19
• Graphics: Crossfire 2x Sapphire RADEON R9 290 Tri -X OC with AMD Eyefinity, resolution 5760 x 1080
• Sound: Logitech z 5500 5.1

I don’t know how I feel about using projectors instead of monitors. I can see the advantages and disadvantages to both, however I can’t help but think I would prefer three big monitors for the image quality they can offer over the rear-projected images this setup uses – at least I believe they’re rear-projected, otherwise his head would be blocking out part of the center image. Even if they were front projected, you would need screens, or at least screen-paint (when was the last time you saw 1080p paint?); it just seems very cumbersome to me I also couldn’t get past the sheer geekery of wearing the head tracker on his head, especially since it didn’t react exactly to his movements, the view changed sometimes according to where he was looking, and sometimes not. I believe he had a ‘Center’ command he could say to bring everything back to front.

Still, great setup, and it could always be expanded for other experiences.