What Are "Roving Eye" 3D Graphics?

"Roving Eye" is our name for 3D graphics which let you look in any direction without turning your boat. You can rotate the view to increase your awareness of the sailing situation. You also can see your boat and sails from any angle. Rotate the view up to a full 360^o by pressing arrow keys and by clicking on "eyeball" bars. Normally, when steering, you have the view looking ahead in order to see where you are going. However, at times you must see where you are in relation to other boats, ships, racing marks, puffs, islands, etc.

Some examples from our simulators:

• The screen capture Sure. We Can Cross! from Advanced Racing Simulator shows that when you look to starboard, you see that maybe you can't cross the fleet. We have found that the user's situation awareness is better when the view includes his or her entire boat rather than using much of the screen for the inside of a cockpit.

• Looking around also lets you see where the wind is and isn't. Cats. Any wind inshore? from Advanced Racing Simulator shows lighter colored water near shore. This means less wind near shore, so you don't want to go there! Any puff would show up as a darker, moving area.
• Racing, you must watch for impending threats to your clear air. On a reach you can look back as in Look upwind. Clear air? from Advanced Racing Simulator.
• In complex tactical situations, a higher viewpoint gives a better awareness of the situation. In Starts are a Challenge from Tactics & Strategy Simulator and Racing. Perfect Start!, the viewpoint is high to see position relative to other boats and rotated to see distance from the starting line. High viewpoint 3D graphics are standard in Sailing Tactics Simulator and an option in Advanced Racing Simulator and Sailing Dynamics Instructor's Simulators.
• "Roving Eye" graphics add to the realism and your enjoyment of our simulators. Two examples from Coastal Cruising Simulator are Sailing  and Peaceful Anchorage.
• In sailing simulators, "Roving Eye" graphics, aren't just pretty pictures. You must navigate and avoid ships, coral heads, rocks, and shoals near islands. In Coastal Cruising Simulator rotatable views like Handbearing Compass Sight provide bearings for plotting a position on the chart, for checking on a predetermined danger bearing on a rock, or avoiding collision with another vessel. In Sailing Dynamics Instructor you can look around for ships as in Eyes right. Ship Approach.

You have such flexibility in the simulator images and they respond to your commands so nimbly because all images are mathematically constructed by the simulator and not just a limited number of stored images. This is also why our simulators require so little disk space and computer memory.