Bruce Artwick: the guy behind Microsoft's Flight Simulator

Foreign.

So who are you?

I'm Bruce Arquick.

What have you done with your life?

Quite a bit here at this PLATO convention. And my main thing that I am known for I guess is flight simulator, Microsoft flight simulator and other computer graphics stuff. I formed a couple of companies, Sublogic Corporation back in the early, early microcomputer era, probably 1977 or so out in Los Angeles. Eventually brought it all back to Champaign, Illinois where I went to school and home of plato.

Tell me, what role did play doh play in getting you to develop plates in.

Well, not a real lot. Some of the technology that PLATO created though was used at aviation research laboratories. That's where I did my master's thesis. And back then there wasn't a lot of. There weren't many addressable screens, any screens that had raster graphics. Most of the displays were either vector oriented or other kinds of technology. And that really was the future. And we had some computers at 704 and PDP 11 that was attached to a PLATO plasma panel which is 512 by 512 resolution. And that allowed us to do kind of raster graphics. And that's sort of the foundation of all computer graphics these days. So I guess you could say that technology helped out. That was from plato.

I had a chance when I worked at Microsoft to play with Flight Simulator 1.0. And it's so different than today's Flight simulator. Right. Tell us a little bit about what the screen looked like because it just.

Had a few lines on it. Right, right. Well, we were working with processors that were so, so weak and not powerful. That and displays that were so low resolution we could only do a few lines of graphics at a time in real time mode. So with, you know, 1 MHz 6502 it just was too much to do dynamic graphics. So we had to keep it simple. But we realized that even a few lines were enough to give you a of movement. And as the technology increased, you know, according to Moore's law, you know, every 18 months the, you know, processing power and graphics got that much doubled in strength and graphics accordingly. So I mean it's gotten to where it is now, where it's photorealistic. I think in 1992 was when version five was, when we really had a breakthrough. As far as reality goes.

What a wild time to see the development of a technology from such an early phase to a fairly mature phase. Where do you think it's going from here?

Well, that's a good question. I always thought I Wondered what would happen once we really had photorealism. And you can keep refining that to the nth degree, but it's not going to look a whole lot different than it does now. I mean, you get smoother graphics and using graphics accelerators now of course you do get smoother graphics. But you know, multiple screens and stuff, people have done that. I really think one area that hasn't been really addressed in flight simulation and I thought about even making a company that would do this is having enclosed small, you know, cockpits that you could have, you know, in your basement or. But not that looks like a cockpit from the outside. Just something small that has some of the motion and that gives the effects of acceleration.

Like a little hydraulic seat or something like that.

Well, I was thinking with stepping motors, not hydraulics. And I know back in the late 90s I'd mentioned some of this to people at Microsoft when they were buying my company, but there's no real interest in it. But I think having flown real flight simulators at Boeing and other places, flight safety simulight, it's just so much fun having the motion and the feel of flying. And I think you can really get that with an enclosed. As long as you're enclosed and you can use tilting to simulate G forces, you can really get some amazing feelings. And no one's really exploited that. I think that's a fairly good direction that could be.

If anything, we're going the other way. With the iPad, you'd turn the iPad to control it, right?

Well, yeah, with that and with sound, as you know, I'm kind of a music fan too. The old big stereos with good audiophile quality. You compare those to everybody who listens to, you know, ipods and stuff these days, it's like it's gone in the other direction. The graphics was the thing that I was mostly interested in. I think that's been really reached a mature state right now. Why flight simulator?

Why did you go down flights? Why didn't you develop a shoot em up video game or something else with the graphics technology you had?

Well, I was a pilot and I was always interested in flying and computers and this was a good combination of the two. But also in flying flight simulators and the research work that I'd done on aviation research labs flying flight simulator, real flight simulator. With the graphics, I knew it was just so much fun. You know, gave a talk once at a convention about my 3D graphics packages that I was selling at the time and I mentioned that this could be used as a flight Simulator that you could, you know, on your microcomputer, go flying around with. And the audience just gasped. I mean, I could hear them saying ah. So I knew I had something there, you know, so I thought I might as well preserve pursue it because the microcomputers at the time were as powerful as the minicomputers that we had at Aviation Research Labs. So I put together something and there was a good audience for it out there. And that's just went down that road. And for a while we had some kind of shoot em up stuff in Flight Simulator. I mean the first version had a game called World War I ace. And of course we made a program called Jet, which was, you know, F18s, F16s and those were quite popular. But just the fun of flying was what I was after. But others pursued the real shoot em up games.

Did you know that the 3D modes in Google Maps was developed by a team that came out of the Flight Simulator group? So you've even influenced, oh really even influenced 3D stuff into Google Maps.

I've heard that there's been projects that people have done to try and get Google Earth and Google Maps information and transform it into flight simulator compatible scenery. Hasn't been so successful, I guess, but yeah, that's good to know.

It's an honor meeting you. And do you have a website or a blog or a Twitter account or anything like that where we can talk with you or follow you or see what you're doing?

My Last company was bao.com and I have that domain, bao.com but all I have is some personal stuff there and if you go there, you won't see anything. I've kind of been taking a break for a bit after working on flight simulator for 20 years.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciated playing it for several hours of my life.

So thank you. Okay, you're welcome.