Collimated Mirror Design Calculations - second attempt!

[Jack Sprat]

My original post has hit a glitch that has now deleted the post from viewing, after an attempt by me to edit it and include pictures. I have reported this and repeated my post here.

I am a complete new guy to the sim world and I would like to understand the principles of a collimated display. From reading other posts I have learned the basics of starting at the viewpoint and send parallel rays from there to the mirror and then determine where the reflected rays meet and that point represents the location of the screen surface.

I made a spreadsheet to calculate these points and draw the results of viewpoints, mirror and screen surface, in the vertical and horizontal planes. I did this for each viewpoint of the pilot and the co-pilot separately; I also included the results for a viewpoint located midway between the pilot and co-pilot.

The results from this are shown in the diagrams below; it shows that a different screen surface location is optimum for each viewpoint of pilot and co-pilot. As real simulators only have one screen I wondered if there is an error in how I have calculated the screen surface points.

From documents in another thread I now suspect that my mistake was treating each viewpoint separately, when i should have used a single light ray from each viewpoint to determine the screen surface. I will do this and see how the results change.

My original question was how to calculate the locations of viewpoints from which a given setup of mirror-screen works properly, e.g. how far apart can the pilot/co-pilot sit for a given display layout to work properly. Can anyone help on this?

JS