I keep seeing posts where some bug or annoyance “ruins immersion” and it kinda makes me chuckle. First of all, if users want full immersion, they should fly real planes. While using a sim, there’s a huge element of imagination that goes along with the thrill of flying virtual planes but every last one of knows that
1. We’re not ever in danger. A failed landing or crash bruises our egos. That’s it.
2. The sim will only perform to the extent that our systems/internet allow and there are real boundaries there.
3. We will never have the full physical effects on our bodies that you would experience in a real plane. Even a professional simulator that can tilt to give the illusion of motion does not feel exactly like real life G forces.
4. VR is amazing but using it requires a very expensive and fast machine to achieve the graphical clarity we can get in 2D. You can do multiple monitors but every one you add cuts down your frame rate and possible resolution and then you are in 2D.
5. Weather can never be just like you see outside every place in the world. There is not enough data and even if there was, if you tried to process it all, the sim would grind to a halt.
6. ATC can and will get better but it will never reach the level of actual human interaction and there will always be mistakes and improper logic even if all the data it needs is always there (and it’s not and never will be).
I love all the banter back and forth because ultimately it helps developers get a feel on where to focus their attention and things gradually get better and more realistic but let’s admit that they never will approach “full immersion” (whatever that means).
Oh exactly. Take for instance being in VR in a Fenix Airbus. The only way you can easily turn knobs and switches is with a mouse and that is completely unnatural compared to what you’d be doing in an actual cockpit and yet, through my imagination, I feel like I’m actually turning those knobs and pressing those buttons. I could get extra hardware where I have physical switches and knobs but of course those work best in 2D so you lose the depth you get with VR (except for some real serious and expensive home cockpits with perfect graphical cutouts and even that though has limitations).
In defence of immersion: Flying in MSFS is flying a fake aircraft on a screen - it is by definition a suspension of critical judgement, traded for an experience. Even if you are using a mouse to flip a switch - if things are working as designed, you aren’t thinking of the mouse, you are visually flipping the switch and seeing, hearing, and feeling the result, which has consequences in the ‘narrative’ of the flight.
Like when immersed in a movie, a book, a concert, or an album, or any other activity where your attention is captivated - you are participating somewhere other than the place you are sitting. That’s what Microsoft is selling, and anything that breaks that for a lot of people is ultimately a problem worth trying to fix.
Immersion IS the benchmark of the user’s experience of flight simulation, or any virtual activity (in my opinion).
Totally agree with everything you said. It always makes me laugh too when people cry “Immersion! Oh immersion!” We’re sat in front of our PCs, or in an armchair in front of your console playing a computer game and pretending that we are flying an airliner.
I, for my part, really love the immersion I get from MSFS, and I will always shout out if ■■■■■■ programing diminishes that!
To put things into perspective: I went all out on my setup, admittedly spending way too much cash in the process. But now I do my simming with a high resolution VR headset (with eye tracking and MR capability), a motion rig and a sonic transducer that replicates even the slight vibrations of the fuel pump.
I also have almost 2.000 hours of RL flying time (started at 15 with gliders, later hang gliders, UL and small single engine AC), accumulated over more than 30 years. I don‘t fly anymore in RL, but I know very well how it feels to be in the cockpit of a real plane. What my sim rig delivers is within striking distance to that! Of course, here is where imagination comes in - for the ultimate kick: the suspension of disbelief we are all striving for…
I don’t mind users expressing concern about something affecting immersion. What I do mind is a demand to “fix it now, or I’m taking my toys and going home!”
I agree with much of the OP’s post. I would add that there are ‘immersion plateaus’.
First and foremost is model fidelity: Exterior details, interior details, and the ever-elusive ‘feel’. I can ignore a lot of minor details if I love the aircraft. Put me in a beautifully detailed aircraft at a highly detailed airport, flying over reasonably realistic buildings and landscapes, and my enjoyment goes way up.
Next, smoothness and stability. Nothing breaks the feeling of immersion like stutters and slow texture/object loading - at any point in a flight. But I’ll take a nice plane with occasional stutters over a crummy plane without stutters any day of the week.
The third plateau is weather and traffic fidelity. Flying through and around realistic weather, with air traffic around me; taxiing to a runway with other aircraft around me; ground crews doing their jobs around me - all add up to a feeling of “being there”. But planes on the ground colliding and passing through each other, clouds that don’t look and behave (at least somewhat) like the real thing, are all worthy of criticism. But I mostly just laugh and keep hoping work is being done to improve them. At this level it’s more NO₂ than O₂ for me.
The next plateau is VR. There’s no denying that VR dramatically increases the feeling of immersion. Headsets are finally getting good enough that if you are willing and able to spend the money, the feeling of being in a richly beautiful 3D space is becoming more than just a dream.
My next ‘personal plateau’ (probably shared by more than a few cockpit builders) is the ease with which I can control events. Are variables exposed for me to use SPAD to assign events to my physical devices? For those who use the sim’s Control UI, same thing, can you find the control assignments you need? Is it easy? Some folks are happy to fly a 747 with an Xbox controller, and I say “More power to you.” I want to greatly reduce reliance on mouse/keyboard/controller. But that’s a personal thing.
Our computers, along with the code they’re running, and our own sim settings, determine how well we can balance things to achieve the most satisfying experience. Xbox users are locked into a platform. They don’t have any control over how the hardware works, and rely on the developers to write code that delivers an immersive experience.
Custom computer users can ‘tweak’ their system’s hardware and software to optimize throughput and latency. But they are also dependent on the code.
Like OP said, “Immersion” is a subjective thing. We all have our plateaus, and not being able to reach them points to a need for improvement. Whether those needs are addressed depends on a lot of things, not the least of which is “How many people have the same need?”
I haven’t seen the term “full immersion” being used widely, but then again I may have overlooked it.
I would venture to say immersion refers to a mostly mental phenomenon that is comparable (to an extent) to a concept called “flow” (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, pronounced “me high; chick sent me high”). To the extent that it involves imagination, I wouldn’t agree that flying a real airplane is the best case of immersion as it doesn’t require much imagination at all. Once you’re flying it, you don’t have much of a choice but to experience what is actually going on. However, if an arrangement of hardware and software can convince some part of your mind that you are flying *an (edit1) airplane when, really, all you are doing is sitting in an office chair and staring at a screen, I think that is a fine case of immersion. And just like certain factors (e.g. being observed by others) disrupt “flow,” bugs and glitches can disrupt “immersion.”
I can’t recall seeing an example of somebody pointing out a bug that they say “ruins immersion” where I then could not sympathize with what they mean, even when I know that particular thing may not affect my sense of immersion.
My sympathy gets hammered when a user feels entitled to demand that their one issue affecting their immersion be addressed or …(something, something, something dire) or that the developers don’t care about the users. Most posts are not like that fortunately but the few that are can really raise the hackles when you crave reasonable discourse.
I’ve given up chasing immersion, after a very long search. I can remember a long time ago, my first flight simulator, maybe Sublogic? It was pretty much wire-frame, clocked at 1 frame per second, and didn’t cover much of the globe. However it did come with a great manual, charts etc, so after spending time learning to fly, knowing just enough to take advantage of the limited features, now and then I would be lifted up and transported across the world, to deal with navigation and deteriorating weather. The sheer concentration required gave total immersion.
Since then, sims have developed into what we have today, but I’ve never been able to recreate those early experiences. I delved into scenery development when my part of the world was first included in a MS sim, and eventually left my job to work on improving the local scenery here.
Now we have MSFS 2024, which I love, but compared to my first sim, 2024 is basically a computer game, it looks like one and performs like one. Ok, it’s an impressive video game, I admit.
Immersion was always in my head, and has little to do with the graphics, features, frame-rate or realistic flight models that we have now.
It is definitely subjective. For me it comes down to how much the experience “dims” the noise and influence of the real world. How effective is the sim at convincing me that the “game” is actually happening? Am I looking at the screen and noticing smudges and dust on my monitor and drops in FPS or am I looking down over the wing of my plane at the winking lights of a coastal farmhouse and wondering what the lives of the people that live down there are like?
VR is certainly a game changer in this regard. I was resistant to it for years, and not out of scorn for the concept, but because I have an eye injury that I assumed would neuter the benefits for me. In fact my injury didn’t have any negative affect and VR has massively deepened my enjoyment of the sim. It’s hard to explain to anyone who has not tried it just how substantially VR elevates the experience and how it really does sit squarely in between flat screen play and real flying. VR even causes some motion sickness so the sensation of your inner ear being a bit messed up is also replicated!
As an example, I was flying up the East coast of Northern Ireland a couple of days ago. I’d not been in the area before but I have a passing familiarity with the geography of Ireland, or at least I thought I did. I was approaching Strangford Lough and I was blown away by how massively the sea penetrates the land and how it does it through the narrowest of channels. I’d never looked at a map of Ireland and seen this before, and it was such a new and interesting way to discover something that is objectively real in the real world. I’d describe that experience as deeply “immersive” as I was, for that moment, totally focussed on drinking in this new visual and sensory information.
So in the end, perhaps VR pushes the real world further back and fully allows the imagination to “flow”? The technology helps, but the human imagination is the key tool in creating “immersion” for ourselves.
There are a lot of good opinions on the topic, and each one demonstrates that “immersion” means different things to different people. Speaking from my own experience flying in VR, it is perhaps the more subconscious reactions that validate the “immersion.” Some examples:
Just after landing the 500C, I reached back with my right hand to pull the rotor brake.
In the same helicopter, I reached up to grab the handle on the left door frame when exiting.
The first time I tried MSFS 2024 in VR, I could honestly say I was smelling aviation fuel from the 182 cockpit.
I tried to rest my left arm on the door of the A2A Comanche.
So something must have convinced my brain I was NOT where I actually was in reality. That’s what immersion means to me.
Immersion is personal and context driven. What breaks it for one person might not matter at all to another. Hardware, performance, aircraft quality, and expectations all shape the experience, so it makes sense that people hit different limits and care about different issues. The key is recognizing that none of those views are wrong, just different.
almost every GAME has people stating things on immersion. in gaming its how much the game draws you in, I think you are confusing immersion and realism. as for: if users want full immersion, they should fly real planes (which is realism). i will be glad for you to pay for the lessons for me thanks. just dont tell my dr or my passangers the Epilepsy might kick in at anytime.
I think that for many people, good immersion simply means not being disturbed by an annoying detail that unnecessarily monopolizes your attention, distracts you, and disrupts the smooth running of your activity.
