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Mind Blowing.........but don't hang up your TIR just yet.

Without trying one for yourself it is difficult to describe what I saw. It certainly is not perfect. In fact it is far from perfect. Everything shimmers. There are no sharly defined lines.

But.......... I cannot go back to the flat screen. The immersion factor from the perspective of a feeling of vastness, depth, height, movement (my stomarch lurched on occasion), speed (particlulary on approach or low passes - it is jaw dropping. FSX is not renowned for volumetric clouds - but you get them - don't know why, dont know how - but they also feel real size - they are massive. I set up a thunderstorm over San Francisco using the preset. It was amazing. I was in the A2A Cherokee. It was being thrown around a tad - but it felt so real (apart from me not physically moving). But it plays tricks with your mind - phenomenal ones. A break in the clouds and you bank and look down through this hole in clouds and you feel like you are 4000' up. The ability to judge distance and height is uncanny.

And flying above a layer of cloud with the sunset is stunning - you just want to keep flying toward the sun. You do not want to stop what you are doing.........it is mesmorising.

But don't rush out and but one yet unless you are happy to compromise on the quality of the visual - but if you are just too curious for your own good (as I am) then I don't think you will be disappointed - but you have been warned - it is far from perfect. The headsets are development kits right now and pushing up the resolution with any decent amount of detail will give you an OOM in seconds (remember although the resolution might not seem that high it has to push out two slightly different images - half on each side of the screen) for the 3D experience.

Then there is the issue of the pixilation. If you go to this link and set it to 1080 - that is sort of what you see - except that in the moving scenario all those pixels cause the shilmmering and lack of sharpness. I say that is all you see but I must emphasis that you also see this vast 3D world which feels real size, which unless you experience it it is so hard to imagine.

http://vr.mkeblx.net/oculus-sim/

The consumer model (which is CV1 in the demo) will reduce this pixellation considerably.

For basic point to point GA flying where you know where you are and you know where you want to go it is completely workable assuming you can do it by VFR and don't need to programme the GPS or play around with the radio nav too much (although you can lean forward just as in RL and twiddle those knobs quite accurately). For anything more complex it will take a lot of refining. But for me with this amazing piece of kit and the amazing work that this chap is doing to bring us Virtual Reality to the flight sim world https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1232710074/flyinside-fsx?ref=hero_thanksI just want to fly around the world in my virtual bubble.

Oh and one other thing - the system uses something called Timewarp - and basically if the screen in the headset is refreshing at at least 75fps then it has a way of guessing and merging any delayed frames from the sim itself. I had quite heavy settings over San Fran and the FSX framerate was dropping into the low teens from time to time, with the load of the object settings and a thunderstorm. But Timewarp did its job and the fight model stayed a fluid and smooth as oil

I think that this is the start of something very big for the flightsim hobby - I could be wrong but based on this early evolution it looks immensely promising.

cheers

Peter

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Having been looking at some at the weekend my biggest issue is if you need to flip switches ..tune radios etc and like me you have saitek gear then you cant see that ao they become redundant.

It does look fine but I dont want to be where I am unable to see around me...

Wayne

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After a couple of hours with the Oculus Rift and headset on your ears, you take them off and realize someone has emptied your house in the meantime...  Or your wife has packed up and left leaving a note on the kitchen table.  :D   ( the last one could although be good news depending on personal circumstances... :)  )

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I used it over the weekend too and I was very impressed with it, I got that stomach lurch too when in a deep bank looking over the wing to a cliff face  :D

 

It's got a long way to go but it's still early beta, definitely something I will be looking at again in the future.

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Thought I would do a quick up date on this. I set up in none Orbx detail region territory (other than Global Base) and flew out of LOWI. By moving to a nearly default area I was able to ramp up the the Rift to the highest resolution from within the FlyInside settings. The same with the antialiasing - ramped up to Ultra. The other thing I did was learn how to reposition myself (being an XPlaner I did not know the ctl and shift commands in FSX). So with perfect positioning and a huge reduction in shimmering and screendooring, the experience was taken to another level. Flying up to 10000' into the A2A Cherokee over the snow ridges of the Alps and then experiencing the vast valleys open up below is a truly magnificent feeling - I was alone in the room saying 'wow!' and 'awesome' out loud - thinking "I am 55 what am I doing?"

Whilst I have been very impressed in my flightsim world (triple monitors and TIR), I have never been so utterly wowed by any experience in a home flight sim before - and actually in terms of visual out of the window not even the professional motion airline training sims.

When this has matured I really believe it will change our hobby for good.

Hopefully there will be a chance to experience one at Cosford for those of you that are going. If there is I would encourage you to try it out.

cheers

Peter

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Sounds promising. I have seen them but my main question is what do u do with regard to switches and buttons. Would this make saitek panels defunct. I imagine it is a fantastic feeling and for the likes of DCS and other combat stuff it will work great but still not sure on a flightcwhere I am tuning radios etc..

Wayne

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I had a go using this at Cosford last year and I was impressed then but development has continued since. So I will be having another go at Cosford this year to see what the difference is. I must admit though, it is a very surreal feeling when you look down to the yoke, which you are holding and you can't see your hands. Weird! I agree Wayne, this is a real concern. I would like to own the O-R when it becomes available but not being able to see the controls I would be using is a problem that would be a juxtaposition where I can see where I'm flying, but flying blind at the same time.

Maybe a camera located somewhere on your person, linked to the O-R so that it too could see what controls you are using.

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Daniel at FlyInside is working now on the Leap Motion option. Obviously the technology has a long way to go but the aim is to be able to manipulate the buttons and knobs in the VC with your hands usiing virtual reality.

This will give you a glimpse of how it might work.

cheers

Peter

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Wow! They have implemented my idea already, that was fast work. :D

Thanks Peter for sharing the video. Very interesting and something to definitely worth watching out for.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have been using the Oculus Rift since last October and have seen an absolute amazing rate of development especially with the FlyInside software with increased resolution and much more. I alpha and beta tested it for fsx and p3d and have been blown away. I have been really happy with frame rates running Genx and Orbx at a very reasonable rate, I normally average about 75fps in P3D settings on medium settings but the frame rates need to be higher than normal because of it rendering for the flightsim and for the Oculus Rift.

 

I hope to be seeing the next stage of development soon when the leap motion feature is added to the flyinside software and will go out for testing. I have tried the leap motion using their apps and it is amazing and to be able to operate switches dials even the main controls will be the finishing touch. I find it much easier to use the mouse in the cockpit using VR so using your hands will revolutionise flight simulation. I can honestly say that I don't think there would be a need to use a throttle device because you will easily be able to operate it in the VR environment. I know that anyone who is involved with the development of FlyInside would agree that it is about to help change the whole concept of flight simulation.

 

I am hoping that I will be at the Cosford show and bringing the Oculus Rift along with Leap Motion and FlyInside I will be with the South West Flight Simulation Group.

 

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If anyone is down this way, that's Plymouth, and wants to have some time trying out the new vr software and vr headset then your welcome to come round,  just drop me a line and we can make the arrangements..

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Unfortunately I couldn't be much further away from you John, otherwise I'd be knocking on your door constantly.

If however you ever venture north of the border, then bring it with you and call in for a coffee.....and a dram of course. :D

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think I may have an issue with motion sickness with this, but it does seem to be an interesting development.

 

My only issue is exactly how to tailor it in to FSX/P3D.  What I mean is this:

 

The only aircraft you could use successfully with is would be very high end add-ons.  Those that 99% of things that need to be done can be done from a switch in the VC. Finding a keyboard and pressing the correct key would just be impossible.

It seems to me that you could probably use a joystick and throttle set and 'feel' your way around these to at least fly the aircraft, but then surely you would also need a mouse to virtually hit the switches you can see in VR.  Now I don't know about you but I haven't got three arms. I guess you would have to program the hat switch to act as a mouse and another two buttons to be left and right mouse buttons.

 

Then there are the things that there are not usually present in a cockpit that you need to do, like changing views and opening exits etc.  I am beginning to run out of joystick buttons here.

 

For me the jury is still out. I have yet to try it so I don't have answers to my questions above.  Perhaps someone who has used it a lot can enlighten me?

 

JG 

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