Real Gauges for Sims

I am thinking of physical gauges for simulated instruments. This would be like a box with a dialface that looks like a speedometer, that you set on your desk. I know several companies have made these for specific flight simulators etc.

******** My new idea is to make the interface a standard, and to make the gauge generic and modifiable with a custom face and dial for each game. *********

When you play a driving game, the speedometer indicates the simulated speed of your car. That is, you have a set of real instruments on your desk, and the display is just used to show the view from the car/plane/tank/ship or whatever, just like they use with high end simulators. I know these have been around forever, but they are not widely used in games because the game needs to support them, and the gauge has to be customized for the type of game.

Specific implementation:

1. Make a standard for all simulation games that use gauges of any kind (speedometers, artificial horizons, tachometers etc etc) to output the readings. Maybe this could be part of DirectX or something, or some sort of standard .dll, or some thing that Linux machines can handle too. This would be like force-feedback, a defined standard that any game can use.

2. Make a generic gauge. It uses a stepper motor to arbitrarily rotate a shaft. It takes a punch-out paper face and a punch-out paper needle (or artificial horizon, or whatever.) It interfaces via USB.

3. In any computer game that uses gauges, include a paper card with the dial face and dial needle. You punch out the face, slip it into the generic gauge, and it becomes an instrument for your sim game. Additionally, or alternatively, they could include a .pdf file or something like that so you could print your own dial.

The software will allow you to set up as many gauge devices as you like, so you can buy 10 generic gauges and turn your desk into a fully instrumented flight simulator, or buy 3 gauges and turn your desk into a car dashboard.

In addition to gauges, you could support blinking lights, external buzzers, and other doodads, with the same interface. For example, the drag racing game might have a tachometer that includes a shift-light. It would output the tach reading and the state of the light. If you had both a dial gauge and a USBified R-G-B LED, you put the dial gauge on the desk, stick the LED on top of the gauge, and then you have a pretty good shift-indicting tach. Later, you might reuse the gauge as an artificial horizon and the lamp as a landing-gear up/down indicator. Of course, if the sim needs more instruments than you have, you could have a mix of on-screen and real instruments. You could even use instruments for non-sim games, as a dial indicating how many hitpoints your RPG guy has left, for example.