Saab and Varjo Bring VR to Flight Simulators

Saab and Varjo have advanced in their collaboration of many years to the point in which Varjo’s technology will be integrated in Saab’s new Gripen E/F simulators. The collaboration has its roots in Varjo’s innovation, which was critical to the successful development of the simulations.

“When we did our first experiments with commercial devices, we received feedback from the pilots that they were unable to read text in virtual reality because the resolution was not sufficiently high. This was not a problem with Varjo’s technology,” says Stefan Furenbäck, Saab’s Head of Tactical Environment Simulation and Visualisation.

Varjo’s Bionic Display is based on the idea of how the human eye works; you see everything in the middle of your field of vision in ultra-high resolution and anything in the peripheral vision in lower resolution, enabling a fully natural and smoothly performing virtual experience.

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This is done by projecting patterns on the surface of the eye with infrared LEDs that are monitored by small cameras and the resolution adapts to the movements of the eye. Human-eye-level resolution can be achieved without supercomputers if it is known what point the human eye is looking at at any given moment. The maximum computing power is always focused on the current point.

Varjo’s technology uses video cameras to constantly capture the environment for the purposes of mixed reality. This means that the images from the real world work on the same principle – the high-resolution image comes from the focal point. This allows powerful gaming computers to be used to operate the technology instead of supercomputers.

“We’re finalising the basic functionalities in our own simulator so that we can use Varjo XR-3 headsets in all our flight simulators. We’ve previously carried out smaller, independent prototype-like projects but now we’re integrating them into our actual flight simulators,” says Furenbäck.