It would be nice to be able to take pictures in VR like you would do with your camera / phone during a flight…
Yes; a “Snapshot camera for VR” would be awesome!
In this particular sim, the view while flying is often as important as the flying itself, and sharing some of the experience of exploring the world in pictures is as natural as taking snapshots while travelling IRL.
- some kind of camera interface (a smartphone?)
- a significant “stutter” is acceptable (not rendering the VR views while capturing a high quality “pancake” screenshot) as long as it’s fully automatic
- maybe add geo-tagging meta information in the screenshots? (I.e. lat/long in the image exif-data. This goes for non-VR screenshots as well.)
And yes, we can do it “manually” today: drop out of VR, grab a screenshot and jump back into VR (of course having to open all panels and adjusting our position again), but a camera interface allowing us to capture the beauty of the world without breaking the immersion would be a very welcome addition.
Voted!
EDIT: We’ve seen a camera viewfinder view in the Flight Simulator 2024 teaser video. Is this a new snapshot feature? Will it work in VR?
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Would such a camera be able to see the view as our eyes see it, or do we get the two eyes or one of the eyes?
The main reason to add a virtual camera to VR (this wish-list item) is to capture plain 2D images just like any normal camera would IRL. The problem with screenshots in VR (e.g. using nvidia, gamebar, etc) is that the screen in VR shows the stereoscopic rendering (“two eyes”) which doesn’t make for nice images.
In software, the solution would be to temporarily render a third camera view of the 3d scene (for an actual “virtual camera”), i.e. just like the camera used for “pancake” mode, or at least render one of the VR-views (“eyes”) in full resolution and without masking.
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I’m not looking for reasons, I love the idea. What I’m looking for is the ability to capture and merge both eyes into an image. It’s easy to capture 1 eye, I haven’t seen any tools to take both eyes and merge them into a single image, which I imagine is difficult.
I like the third camera view idea. I think it may be difficult for MSFS2020, as they don’t support other windows currently like the old versions used to be able to do. But, I like the idea.
I mostly was wondering what the OP and others had in mind for what to capture.
Because the two eyes views have different camera positions, it’s not possible to merge them into a single 2d image in a seamless way as a general process. You’d introduce some sort of distortion or image corruption at the boundary between the two views.
If you’re going to do anything other than just un-fisheyeing one eye view, it’s probably best to just render a clean image. 
In the old days, it was more difficult… I’ve done similar image manipulation 10 years ago, (and I’m a lowly mech e who likes to dabble)… today… there’s lots of possiblities with AI…
I agree it’s not easy to do, but not impossible.
Be that as it may, I agree a “3rd” camera view is a better solution, but I don’t think that’s possible with 2020 currently, not easily anyway.
Well, don’t expect any new features in MSFS 2020. There’s probably only one or two minor sim updates left.
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Not a bad idea, but the view should definitely be offset about 30-40% lower with no way to change it, like we have now with externals views in Flight Sim. (Rolls eyes)