Ship bridge simulations made in Magdeburg
On Saturday, 11 March 2017, one of the world’s largest training centres opened its doors near Amsterdam (Netherlands). A company from Magdeburg also participated in the opening: domeprojection.com®. The engineers of these company made it possible that future captains complete their training under absolutely realistic conditions.
Magdeburg / Berlin / Almere (Netherlands), March 11, 2017. ’The CSMART Academy’ opened its doors in Almere, Netherlands, eight months after its commissioning. According to the CSMART Academy, it is the largest training center for shipping worldwide. Here, captains and crews are prepared for their responsible tasks. At least since the disaster of the cruise ship ’Costa Concordia’ on the coast of Italy in 2012, the shipping companies have been aware of the importance of the preparation of the ship’s crew, in particular in exceptional and highly dangerous situations.
A dedicated team of engineers from Magdeburg was part of this large project. The Dutch partner company Pro Systems® commissioned them to help to install the four Full Mission Bridge Simulators of CSMART Academy. Pro System® created the design and construction of the screens and tasked domeprojection.com® to install the hardware and software for the projection systems.
domeprojection.com® set up the display systems of nine ship bridge simulators in total. These are the key elements of the training academy. The software ProjectionTools developed by domeprojection.com® enables the engineers to set up projection technology automatically and precisely calculate spatial projections. It also allows seamless multichannel projections. This makes a nearly authentic view into virtual environments possible. Each full-mission bridge simulator of CSMART is framed by a cylindrical 220 degrees horizontal field of view with two additional sets of bridge wings with dome projection, each with a 180-degree field of view. The screens of these replicas of original ship bridges are now projected with virtual environments as a result of the teamwork of Pro Systems® and domeprojection.com®. The database of this virtual environment does not only contain data of major cruise ports. Also, the sea and weather conditions can be changed. The result is that the simulation not only looks deceptively like real, but also feels like it.
’In the middle of 2016, two teams worked for more than a month to set up projectors and cameras to make the simulations as real as possible’, explains Christian Steinmann. He is the CEO of the company and part of the engineering team from Magdeburg. ’On the one hand, now it is possible to practice basic procedures such as loading and unloading cruise ships. On the other hand, emergency situations can be also simulated. Now the crew is trained to make the right decision in case of an emergency.
’It is impressive to see the result of our work in the new training facility and to know that we could contribute our part for safe shipping. ’