I was solely talking VFR and from a new trainee pilots perspective. I dont ever expect anyone to get signed off on a home PC sim.
Rudder, understanding which way it moves the plane on the ground through to coordinated turns and slip ball corrections are all quite capable in a sim - vr or non vr. However what VR brings to the table is the awareness of the VFR pilot on their outside influences. The ability to know the correct attitude of the aircraft from the pilot seat you cant get as well on 2d because your sitting looking at a monitor whereas in VR your in the pilot set looking out the aircraft. The old PIC’ used to know a simmer cause they just started at the dials, not in VR your looking out glancing at the dials just as you do IRL, you cant really get this on a monitor as its too small (even a 100" your still seeing the room its in!)
Throttle response, correcting direction for wind, climbing, descending, turning, all these can be practiced along with landing. Its not real, even with a good 3D movement rig beneath you its still not the same as being pushed around in the air by turbulence, but its is absolutely the future and its cheap enough for some of use to afford and put in our houses.
If it does not make you throw up then every simmer should try it. My last point the 4K crowd thinks that what they see is what a pilot see’s. At least in the UK we have haze and even with 5k minimum visibility you really cant see anywhere near as clearly as you can on a 4K monitor, missing and loosing airfields IRL is a fact of learning! So even a low res CV1 can give you roughly the same sort of visuals you get when flying in a moderate climate.
The over all topic is about realism. My opinion is while there are elements of realism in these games especially with VR, that it in no way accurately mimics actual true to life flying. I’ve flown in Level D sims that are challenged in that aspect. The difference is the Level D sim accurately replicates the aircraft types cockpit.
Your statement you gain Muscle memory for all the controls. This was in line with the realism conversation. Real life flying muscle memory (improved motor skills) contribute to your stick and rudder skills.
None of this is an argument, I’ve made my opinion fairly clear. If you’re a real pilot wanting to use the game as a supplemental procedural trainer, it’s more efficient to pick an avionics suite similar to what you fly, use your EFB, run through your procedures, do a flight, use something like PilotEdge to simulate the ATC communication component, etc. Doing this in VR would be an added challenge that doesn’t have any real world benefit.
It’s also my opinion that VR does have a use in primary training. Similar to what is stated in those articles, cockpit familiarization, understanding of avionics layout, even checklist run through would reinforce training items. I specifically mentioned flight maneuvers and that you could get the procedures down but you’re not going to get that muscle memory, stick and rudder skill set from the game VR or 2D.
I’ll lay out a scenario and leave it at that. Crosswind landings are something new and old pilots alike struggle with. One technique requires cross controls which pilots are inherently uncomfortable with… meaning you’re yoke/stick is one direction and your pushing on the opposite rudder pedal. Assuming you have some pedals and yoke/stick, you can set the game up with an over exaggerated cross wind and give it a go. You get ingrained mentally the process of dropping your wing into the wind and staying aligned with the rudder. This is something you can do in the game, however would defiantly need to be reinforced by those stick and rudder skills you’ll only get flying a real plane in the real conditions.
It is easier to do IFR in properly implemented VR. You will see. Clearly you do not know what you are talking about.
MSFS VR is not even half baked. Same with their instrumentation which is a total mess. It isnt useful for procedural training in any sense of the concept.
If we were talking about FSX or X-plane that would be a different story. Wait till you try VR with proper controller implementation. You will understand what I am on about.
That must be the case, I’m amazed I even passed my Instrument check ride without having enough VR time. I’m thankful even more that I haven’t crashed my own plane trying to navigate around in IMC with the lack of muscle memory developed though VR on pushing buttons and turning knobs!
As a professional pilot with 7,000 hrs and a former CFI, no, VR and FS2020 would not do a lot to help out with flight training. The feel of the controls, sound, and everything else is totally different. It is fun and you can do stuff like practicing using VORs, NDB tracking, etc, but actually flying, I would say no. Don’t get me wrong, it will help some (maybe 5% out of 100%) but that is about it. That is my opinion as someone who has been flying for quite a while and has VR on FS2020. FS2020 could create bad habits to a student pilot. For example, you can develop muscle memory on the sim and try to do something based on muscle memory in the airplane. To prevent this, I fly with a joystick with my right hand and a throttle on the left so I do not develop that muscle memory in FS2020 and take it into real airplanes.
Oh, just wait until VR controllers are supported. It’s a whole new level of simulation, when every little switch and knob is directly manipulated. Check out how I set up things in VR in Xplane. Hopefully this would be possible in MSFS soon. At least I hope so. The video is a bit long bot goes through the whole 737 setup, voice-recognition based ATC, voice-activated checklists and FMC programming, real charts in VR etc. My left hand is on the yoke, and my right hand has a VR controller strapped to it. I can help with the yoke when I need to, but mostly I operate other controls with my right hand. See how fast I can operate all switches and buttons. Much better than with a mouse that feels like a crutch afer knowing what controllers can do.
That’s most interesting and a great tip for avoiding muscle memory creeping in. I think that most of us will only really be able to compare VR and the real world within GA, being the only planes we’ll likely be PIC.
@Mobias7, I cannot recommend that anyone purchase a Quest 2 because of FBs policies concerning the device. First, you have to have a FB account (which many people do not have or want) to get it to work, and perhaps even worse, if you manage to annoy one of their censor bots or human moderators and lose your account to a permaban, your Quest 2 will no longer be good for anything aside from holding down paper.
That is because FB is essentially retaining ownership, and “allowing” you to use it only if you play by their rules. Kind of like how when you were a kid, and your parents only “let you” play with your toys as long as you behaved. That might be appropriate for parents and children, but not for adults and the “toys” that they bought for themselves.
Personally even though the Reverb G2s are more expensive, and at least for the moment, are harder to get, I expect we’ll see G2 availability improve far sooner than any 30-series cards.
At any rate, those are my two cents, which may be worth precisely about that much.
I’m no fan of Facebook in the slightest but as far as the Quest 2 is concerned I’ve got a Facebook account and Facebook have long had access to all my data so it seems a bit pointless to now take a stand against them. I would have gladly bought a G2 if they were more readily available.
It made more sense for me to pay a bit less for the cheaper Quest 2 to see if I even liked VR. Now that I know that I do my plan is to sell my Quest 2 and get a G2 in a few months time.
@Kayembee370, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that buried somewhere deep in the Ts & Cs that we all sign without even thinking about it (much less actually reading them) there is a clause that states something to the effect of “This product is heavily subsidized by Facbook, and therefore remains their property, subject to all the rules of the use of Facebook, blah, blah, blah…”
Because the fact is they are very heavily subsidized by FB (which is why they’re so cheap in the first place, compared to say an HP G2 that is not). But then again, with a G2, the “buyer” actually has 100% ownership in the device, and there is no clause buried deep in any contract that gives HP the right to disable it for any reason.
Germany has actually banned the sale of these devices over this very issue, and while that offends my inner libertarian that the government can do that (yes, the concept of “buyer beware” is very real to my inner libertarian), I can also very much understand why they have done so.
Anyway, I wouldn’t buy one, I can’t recommend that anyone else does, and if they lose money over this farce and pull the product from the market, we all win.
Although I also share this idea of “buyer beware”, I can’t help also thinking this great principle is sound and valid if and only if the buyer has access to all the information needed to exercising such choice.
In practice, you can’t and some companies try their best burying and hiding the very needed information which would otherwise detract buyers from purchasing their products. This make it hard to sanely and freely just decide by yourself In these conditions.
This is why any governing body intervening in my opinion, should it be elected by the people for the greater good of the entire society electing it, is a sane and justified recourse against these practices and a natural protagonist in a capitalist society, even if some are still thinking this is socialism and antagonist instead.
I’m sorry for this incursion unrelated to the topic otherwise.
Does this mean that if any of Oculus users are deemed later by Facebook as political or moral or whatever incorrect and get their account banned, they will forever lose their Oculus functionality and receive no refund?
This is beyond my belief. I came from a communist country where you might go to jail if you said something establishments don’t like. However, I never heard something like a dissident’s hardwares or toys got permanently disabled. Government might confiscate data and tools like PCs, but certainly not toys. I guess even a totalitarian regime would be ashamed of using toys to indirectly control what people can say.
Luckily, I never have much to say on Facebook anyway so I don’t mind keeping my Oculus headset for a while. What I really worried is that in the future they might suddenly require all personal accounts to provide more private information (maybe in the name of “holding all social conversation participants accountable”?) otherwise your account will be suspended. I am pretty sure that’s 100% legal for Facebook.
If that happened, I guess I would keep my then useless Oculus/Facebook headset as a souvenir I brought from 1984 George Orwell Virtual Reality.
YES. My oculus account is my mums fb since i didn’t want to link mine to it. I needed the password and sent her a msg on fb asking for the oculus account name and password and fb deleted the message from my messages saying “this msg is against our community guidelines” the msg is still shown on my mums fb message, but deleted on mine. Communism in proper action. I live in Australia
It’s worse than any communism, trust me. I lived under communism for 30+ years but never even thought of such cunning scheme for secret speech control.
The near(?) future is that once you are deemed public enemy or social unfit, you will lose everything from social media account to your credit cards to your internet access,…,include but not limit to your home appliances such as “smart” microwave and stove.
I don’t know what that “virtual desktop” thing you mentioned even is, much less how to use it, or even if it works for my rig (which is a G2 using WMR), but what my fantasy situation is would be the ability to bring specific app windows with things like Navigraph Charts, Little Navmap (which I have, but have basically never used and don’t know how to use, but I know a lot of others swear by it), and even something like a scratch pad where I can write down frequencies or ATC assignments so I can get them programmed into my GPS or wherever I need to get them programmed into would be farging AWESOME!!!
Even a framerate counter would be nice. Personally, I don’t chase framerates just “because”, but that could be helpful if say I want to change my tree settings from medium to high (or even the other way around) and see what, if any, impact it has on frames. It’s easy to say “Well, it’s only 1 fps less”, and that’s true, but if you do 10 of those, and were starting with 35 fps to begin with, it can start to add up. Just like “It’s only $30 for this addon airplane I want” can turn into real money over time if you’re buying 2 of them a week.
But I’m quite certain that it’s not a matter of “if” most of that will happen, but more like “when”, but I’m impatient lol… (Or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking, but I sure hope not.)
