What is the best flight/car simulator for commercial purposes

I'm new to the world of flight and racing simulators. I've been working in the VR industry for about 10 years and I'm currently in the process of researching which types of simulators to include in our family entertainment venue that will have 10 simulators (along with immersive arcade and golf sims etc). We are looking for the top-of-the-line and user-friendly simulator that has the best haptics and motion system. As for having VR simulators in our facility, I am not strongly opposed to it, but it will not be my first option as we expect to have a high customer throughput and dealing with sweaty headsets from customer to customer is not ideal. So any top-of-the-line simulators that have wrap around monitors or 180 screens, etc, is something I'm interested in.

I found an old video that shows a very cool concept (I reached out to the company and have yet to hear back).



For the car simulators we are looking at the Teleios Hydra One with DBOX motion simulator. We love the look, the air pneumatics, and the company is very helpful and proactive.

I'm having a little harder time to find flight simulators in the same realm. For the flight simulator I'm looking at the Viper Wing series, (they have great ratings and they look badass) however, they don't have motion.

Are there any awesome recommendations that you suggest? Don't worry about price, we are interested in knowing what the top-of-the-line versions are out there. We would love for it to look awesome in order to drive the wow factor.

The cherry on top would be if the simulator allows for both Cars and Flight so that we would have all the same simulator in our venue, and it's up to the customer to decide what to play.

I appreciate any information

Thank you

Questions like this are very difficult to answer. It heavily depends on your expectations and how much money you can spend. So I don't even try. However, I'd like to mention some of the problems I came across when evaluating simulator designes I saw. I hope it will help you not to fall for the tricks you often see in promotion videos.

Commercial simulator rigs are often built to impress the spectators (standing outside or watching videos), not the pilot that actually sits inside. You probably won't hear much complaints because most people never drove an F1 car or flew a helicopter so they have nothing to compare to. And most people don't admit they spent money for something dissappointing. If you own an arcade hall that "catch" might play to your advantage but I'd call that fooling the customers (although some may say that "fooling" the brain is the whole purpose of a simulator)

* Windows (like those covered with nets in the video above) are immersion killers. It's the whole point of a motion simulator that the person inside does NOT know his/her real orientation relative to the outside world. For example, tilting the seat backward to simulate acceleration pressing you into the seat only works if you don't see you're tilted. So any serious simulator has to use either VR goggles or has to be fully enclosed.

* If you see a car simulation and the rig does not roll at all during turns then forget about it. Shaking the seat a bit to simulate the bumps of the track is only one of the required features. The rig has to roll to the left during a right turn, pitch back during acceleration and pitch forward while braking to simulate the cetrifugal and acceleration forces. Many commercial rigs don't do that, I guess to avoid alignment problems with the stationary screen or compensation problems with the VR headset. But it kills immersion.

* If you want one rig for different types of vehicles then VR is the only affordable way to go. VR-less simulators need a real dashboard and that can't easily be replaced when you swap car vs. aircraft. VR, however, has it's own drawbacks. It's not family or multi-passenger friendly.

* 360° gimbal systems are over-rated, IMHO. They look impressing but for the immersion the ability to rotate more than +/-30° is not as important as you might think. During a looping in a roller coaster or flying a barrel roll in a plane the acceleration vector still points from your head to your butt. So you don't need full rotation to simulate that. OK, for fighter jets, aerobatic planes or space ships this is not true but then there's still so much you can't do with a 360° gimbal like zero-g or sustained >1g pulls. So I'd say that being tumbled around can be fun but it has nothing to do with realistic simulation and a rig with heave, sway and surge can do better than a gimbal without.