To VR or not to VR. That is the question

User Support Hub Virtual Reality (VR)
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Corny thread title I know but it fits.

This post is meant for those that don’t yet own a VR headset and maybe have never tried one. It’s meant to help you manage your expectations. It will be interesting to read what those that have experience with it have to say. At the end of this there’ll be a recommendation regarding which headset to buy.

I’ll start by paraphrasing a line from the movie The American President - starring Annette Benning and Michael Douglas:

“VR isn’t easy. You’ve got to want it bad!”

Put aside concerns about hardware, price and specifications for the moment. There’s one consideration that I rarely see mentioned in posts and videos about VR:

Comfort.

Lately I’ve taken to telling people that “The most comfortable VR headset isn’t comfortable,”

Do not gloss over that line.

The DK1 and DK2, for me, were more comfortable than the Rift S. I can’t speak from experience about the Oculus CV1 or any other headset because I’ve not tried them. The Rift S, however, is considered to be one of the most comfortable of its generation.

As an aside, the reason I didn’t get a CV1 is because its pixel density, and therefore the “screen door effect,” was only about twenty-five percent finer than the DK2. Not long after the S was released I calculated that it has, if I recall, about a seventy-one percent finer resolution. Being very keen on Condor 2 Soaring Simulator - and FSX using FlyInside FSX, I decided it was time to upgrade. So if the reviews I’ve seen comparing the comfort of the Rift S with its competition are accurate, we could more properly say that the S is less uncomfortable than the others.

Concerned about degradation of the foam faceplate padding due to skin oil, I splurged and ordered a set of vrcover’s slip on cotton(?) covers. They had the added bonus of being easily removed and cleaned. However, their roughness irritated my skin so I ordered a silicone cover.

The silicone cover seemed like a good idea. It’s soft and easily disinfected with a wipe. Oddly though, it makes the S less “comfortable,” than the bare foam. I’m not sure why and intend to remove it and see whether I’ve just gotten more fussy as I get older.

One thing that can mitigate some of the discomfort of a headset is to fasten a counterbalancing weight to the back of it. I haven’t done so yet but might try it. That’s not going to help at all when it comes to itchiness felt when it rubs my hair against my scalp but at least the slight, but noticeable, front heaviness will be gone.

Putting physical comfort aside there is another consideration with VR vs, say, either TrackIR or a triple monitor setup:

FOV.

The Rift S has a one hundred and fifteen degree field of view. So, in theory, you’ll be looking out at the wonderful msfs scenery at just shy of sixty degrees each way. In theory.

In reality that FOV is somewhat less than stated. Actually, to be fair, I’ve not actually measured it with real usage. I imagine though, that when manufactures market their offerings they do what used to be done back in the days of CRT monitors. CRT specs overstated the effective size due to the fact that the bezel covered the edges of the tube. When you bought a “15 inch,” monitor you lost about a half inch all around.

To enjoy the stated FOV I think you’d have to have your eyeballs a millimeter away from the lens. This is because the lenses aren’t wide enough to allow you to see to the edges of the screen. Even if you are that close another problem arises: oil. Oil on your lashes will streak on the lens. So… don’t blink!

There is a final consideration regarding comfort that depends on how well implemented VR is in msfs: buttons and keys.

If Asobo puts our (virtual) hands in the sim that’ll go a long way to eliminating the problem.

If most every function you use is mapped to your controller that too will help a lot.

If, however, you use the keyboard a lot you’ll either be fumbling by feel using the typist home keys F and J to orient your fingers, or you’ll be peeking out of the headset along one side of your nose.

It’ll be absolutely fantastic if we have our hands in the cockpit. FlyInside FSX has had that feature for years - long before the very pricey Valve Index came out. As I had the DK2, which didn’t have controllers, I only recently found out about that feature. I’d like test it with the Rift S controllers but for some reason I get an oom - Out of Memory - crash that prevents even the menu from loading. Sigh.

There’s another problem you’ll experience if we’re to use a mouse to click around the cockpit. That is cockpit shake. It affects us flying on monitors but it’s worse to deal with in VR. It can, however, be dealt with by mapping a button or key to disable and enable the head tracking as needed.

So that’s been a lot of typing, and a lot of reading on your part. I hope you feel it has been worthwhile.

Now for my recommendation - with the caveat that, remember, I’ve only experience with the DK1, DK2 and Rift S:

There is much excitement here in the forums about the soon-to-be-released HP Reverb 2. It specs out real nice so there should be. Me I have reservations about upgrading to it. While it’s not as pricey as Valve’s offerings it costs significantly more than the newly released Quest 2.

If I were to upgrade now, without doing any more research, I’d go for the Quest 2. Why?

The Rift S provides quite a stunning view in Condor 2’s native VR and in msfs using “fake VR,” (Using Bigscreen Beta to set up a curved screen in a black void and then running msfs on it.) The screen door effect is almost imperceptible and really wouldn’t be much of an issue except for the fact that the finer text on flight instruments is fuzzy - even on ultra settings.

The resolution of the Reverb 2 is reported to be at least double that of the Rift S so it almost certainly has no screen door effect. That said, the original Quest had a ten or fifteen percent finer resolution than the S. The Quest 2 is advertised as having fifty percent higher pixel density than the 1. So it too, I expect, has no screen door effect.

Compare the pricing of the Quest 2 with the Reverb 2 and decide for yourself if paying nearly double the price is worth it.

Consider also that, if I’m not mistaken, the Reverb 2’s controllers are slightly larger than the Quest 2’s. At least they look as though they are.

The Quest 2’s controllers, identical except in color to the S’s, are actually very comfortable and there are silicone slip covers you can get for them - with straps you slip your hand through to hold them more securely in active games.

Finally, and maybe the biggest thing going for the Quest, 1 and 2, is that while they’re wireless headsets that run some pretty decent apps - Eleven Table Tennis being one that is EXCELLENT - they can be connected to a PC so that you can access not just your Oculus PC titles but those in Steam as well.

Thanks for reading.

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My biggest concern about VR is that I really don’t know how to match the controller position (I’m planning on going for the Thrustmaster TCA Airbus pack) with the position in the VR cockpit. Missing match would probably ruin the whole experience for me.

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Thanks. Have been thinking about VR myself. Tried HeadTracker and did not like it much. Very much aware that it is just a Sim and there is a limit to immersion. Want to try VR before considering further. Also concerned about safety, ie electronics so close to eyes, brain etc. Also looks stupid! I guess being a regular RL recreational pilot I experience the real thing often enough. Also not sure my mid-range rig would handle it. Still considering. Cheers.

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I used a Rift since the beginning of VR in XPL and P3D. I find it impossible to fly using a monitor now. I bought the Quest 2 and got an immediate increase in screen clarity to the extent I can read the warranty information above and to the left of the pilots head in the Cessna Skyhawk in XPL.

I have an i7 5820, 32gb RAM and twin 980ti cards along with Saitek yoke and rudder pedals. I have no problem with FPS. XPL runs smoothly and without problems.

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Once you’ve clamped the yoke and quadrant in position on the front of your desk, find a chair that puts your eyes and hands at the correct height with relation to the controls without the VR headset on.

Set up the VR headset height so it is in relation to the floor of the airplane cockpit, not the room’s floor.
This might need several iterations.

When you start the sim, get yourself in a fore/aft position where your hands are comfortable on the controls, although they appear in a different position.
Adjust the ‘Cockpit view’ until the image of the yoke comes into alignment with the real yoke in your hand.

Put the pedals on a pile of carpet tiles until they are at the correct height in relation to the yoke. Put slats of timber between the pedal chassis and the wall so they don’t push away.

Have fun.

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Yes agree all that but in XPL you have infinite height and forward/back adjustments using the arrow keys and you can save that as a position, which I suppose you can do something similar in FS?

Chaseplane, as another thread asked, would be useful!

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Love the immersion of VR, hate the visual quality. It’s a few more generations of headsets and obviously GPU away for me. Then though it will be awesome, especially if haptic technology has evolved too. Can’t wait for that.

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To keep the post from getting even longer than it is I left out some comments I’d have liked to include:

To start off with VR is incredible. It’s mind blowing the first time you try it. For me that was when the DK1 came out. I advertised locally for someone with one that would let me come over and try it.

The guy that invited me over loaded up Titans of Space. It was a free title that I think now is less than $10. It models our solar system with the sun and all its planets scaled correctly but their orbits unrealistically small - for the tour. You sit in a single place capsule and are flown around this miniature system. It looks great and is amazing.

So I’m sitting in the ship and looking at the control panel. Then I reached for one of the buttons, despite not seeing my hands in the sim, and banged my fingers into his desk. Embarrassing but he says most everyone does something like that at some point. I’ve read accounts of people playing pool absentmindedly leaning on the felt, as one does, and losing their balance.

More recently, flying a glider about five k up I was cranking and banking. I could hear the airframe creaking and actually had the thought, "■■■■. I better take it easy. I don’t want to break apart without a parachute. VERY quickly I caught myself and laughed at that brief loss of perspective. Such is the power of VR - when it’s new to you at least.

The point is that, yes, in the beginning you can have a bodily, visceral sense of “being there,” (Great movie btw.) It’s part of what makes VR so amazing and appealing.

For me that feeling has worn off. I no longer get any bodily sense of being there, just visual. So, while I agree that, ideally, it would be nice to have your real controls and seat aligned with what’s in the sim, getting pretty close is likely going to be fine.

Remember that visually VR is spot on. I mean… forget movie 3D. VR 3D feels natural. It’s not a case where you’re seeing, let’s say layers of objects - like characters in a popup story book. It’s so very realistic that after a while you forget about it. You have to deliberately study the world to note that, “Oh yeah. I have real depth perception! Cool!”

What I’m driving at is that it’s a case, once the novelty wears off, of set it and forget it. You just get on with flying or racing or pool or table tennis - don’t fall into the table and expect it to catch you! - and, well, you get the idea.

So I think you’ll be so involved in flying, particularly in the more complicated aircraft, that you’ll stop noticing the disconnect between the real world position of the controls and the virtual ones.

I fly with a gamepad and it’s great because I swivel left / right with the re-mapped triggers - rudder on the left stick where it is in RC - and up / down with the left stick. The only reason I think of getting a yoke is mainly for the mixture, prop, throttle cluster - and because the tops of the very short sticks get greasy so I’m constantly reposition my thumbs. If someone made a gamepad with a throttle slider that would be one less reason for getting a yoke. Plus, if I get a yoke now I need pedals if I want to do side-slips. (Glider pilots use side-slips and spoilers to lose altitude more quickly when lining up on final for that no-chance-of-a-go-around landing.)

I’d definitely only buy from a place that allows no questions asked returns. I bought the Rift S at a Microsoft Store in September of '19. At checkout I asked about the return policy and the clerk said I had up to 30 days to return it for any reason. Thirty days! The kicker was when she said, “We’d prefer it if you save the box but it’s not necessary.” I was flabbergasted. I’d never heard of such a generous and lenient return policy.

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This is my system: MSI GL63 - The Game Just Got Real Mine’s the GL63 8SD listed in the center. I’ve upgraded the ram to 32 GBs but otherwise it’s stock.

In nearly all the places I haul cargo and pax - with the excellent but not free OnAir Airline Manager - I run on Ultra with just the object and terrain detail sliders backed off from 200 to 125. I won’t say I get buttery smooth frame rates but they’re certainly extremely flyable and, most of the time, I don’t see any frame hitching. I do though if I don’t slide those two sliders back.

In VR I guess the frame rates will drop to half what I’m getting because the card is putting out two nearly identical images. Even though, to participate in the VR beta they’re stipulating 8 GBs vram I think my system will handle it on medium settings well enough. Maybe even on high.

The reason I think that is because they must have completely ditched the old game engine for this sim. The other day I loaded a C172 out of Langley in the Vancouver, Canada area in P3D v4’s VR. Mountains to the north, lots of city all around, ai aircraft flying all over the place. Oh and Orbx’s Pacific Northwest scenery enabled.

At times the frame rate dipped to just 12 fps. I only know this because I did notice some frame hitching. By that I mean I could see individual frames but the almost unnoticeable delay between each one was extremely consistent. There were no long pauses, short pauses, long pauses etc.

So I checked and was surprised to see just 12 fps. I didn’t think such a low rate could be so “smooth,”

So… your mid-range system will likely handle it on medium. And medium settings in msfs blow the best addon scenery for FSX / P3D out of the water.

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That’s good info. Thanks.

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Ummm. I know my original post was long but did you read all of it? Certainly the Reverb 2, and probably the Quest 2, will deliver clarity to satisfy all but the fussiest pilots. Once the screen door effect becomes unnoticeable all’s clear. That’s unless you’re not satisfied with 1080p. I think the R2, and maybe the Q2, will put out more than that but man, I don’t need more than that.

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I own a Rift (CV1) and the resolution of that one sucks big time. But even if it was better, like it will certainly be with the Reverb 2, I don’t like such a big device on my head all the time. Not nice at all. I also don’t like how using VR somehow detaches me from the real world around me. For starters you can’t easily pick up a pen and write something down or have a cup of coffee or check something on my phone or answer my wife questions and things like that. But VR also actually detaches me from the world: I feel a bit odd and weird after using it. As if it is TOO immersive. Add to that the fact that VR induces migraine (which obviously is a very personal thing: YMMV) and well, I’m back to TrackIR. Sooooooooo much better and more convenient in all possible ways.

To put things a bit in perspective: I mainly used VR with AFS2 for over 6 months. So it’s not that I only tried it for a few hours. VR is nice and it’s immersive but in the end there were more downsides than upsides.

And besides… you get used to it. It’s indeed WOW the first time but after a while it’s just as …wow… as real life is. (I don’t think anyone here walks out of the door in the morning thinking ‘My goodness, this looks good in 3D’!)

Come to think of it: VR is immersive and it fooled me in certain aspects (fear of heights!) but I never ever really had the idea I was REALLY there. I remember taking off and landing for the first time in AFS2 in VR and I really expected to ■■■■ my pants as I would when I would do a real world flight for the very first time but… it didn’t happen at all. I was really there, yes, but ‘there’ very obviously and clearly was a virtual world. I never ever thought I was REALLY there and I never ever was afraid of dying because of a bad landing. I always was ‘there’ inside a computer game. Of course the low res of the Rift (and the cramped FOV) in AFS2 didn’t help here: I am sure things will look better with a Reverb2 in MSFS, but still…

Anyway, to each his own. I am sure and I know others love it to death. You really have to give it a try (for a month or so) before you can really know if VR is something for you or not. (Don’t get fooled by an hour trial.)

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They’re nowhere near. You need 16k per eye to not be able to notice any pixelation.

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Never tried VR.
What if one needs glasses?
I am short-sided and need “reading” glasses. Can I use VR?

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The Quest2 comes with an extra insert called a spacer. Also available for the other headsets too. I use one, no problem. Depending on the one you buy each headset gives you the width of glasses that will fit inside them. Check out the manufacturer’s website for that, it’s somewhere around 14.2cm as max width, and 5cm as max height.

I use my normal distance glasses but I find reading glasses are fine for instruments right in front of my nose, not so good for distant scenery. My ordinary glasses are fine and I think some recommend a focal distance of about 3 feet for their optimum comfort so you’ll have to research that a bit.

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If you only need glasses for close up you should be fine. If you need them for distance you’ll need them in VR. I know that sounds counterintuitive but that’s how it works. That said, I don’t need glasses for either and I’ve no idea if those that do need them for close up are able to read the instruments in VR. For the scenery though, they wouldn’t for sure.

Modern headsets are built to accommodate small sized glasses. Wireless would be ideal. The problem is you’re pushing the eyepieces even further away from your eyeballs so now your fov is even narrower than what’s already barely acceptable.

With some drone goggles you can order prescription lenses. I expect there’ll be a market for that with VR too, if there isn’t already. I don’t know… can lenses be 3D printed or would they not be clear enough?

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Interesting topic…
I have the Oculus Quest (original version, not V2 which is unavailable here in Germany due to facebook’s privacy policy). Sometimes I use X-Plane 11 which is VR ready.
Rendering in stereo costs some fps, that’s for sure. So the image quality is really bad, even in X-Plane which doesn’t look very ‘realistic’ compared to MSFS. You have to reduce it inside the game to prevent stuttering, and the glasses’ resolution is definitely below my 4k monitor :wink:
But I enjoy it very much. I can’t afford a ‘rocking chair’ or something like that to feel the G powers. So stereoscopic view (and the possibility to easily look around) contributes so much to the feel of immersion that I don’t mind the extra weight of the Quest which is indeed boring. It has a battery and obviously more electronics inside, that makes it quite heavy. But hey, look out of the window and feel like being up in the air! And steering the plane is quite intuitive compared to the use of a monitor.
I can’t wait to see Asobo’s solution taking place.
BTW in X-Plane most (if not all) commands can be done using the controllers. Keyboard use is a no-go with the VR set on.

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Absolutely.
I bought an original HTC Vive back in 2018 and thought at the time that, if VR was ever going to be really popular, the headsets needed to be more like putting on a pair of spectacles and less like donning a crash helmet. It’s really not a comfortable experience.
But yes, the visual experience with FSX and Flyinside was brillliant and the headset got a great deal of use but that was some time ago and I haven’t had it on my head since June.
I will try MSFS with VR when it becomes available but I guess it will be more for looking at the scenery while the AI flies the aircraft.

Yes.
But spectacles can make the experience a bit less comfortable.
The best advice is have the smallest frames you can use. I got an old pair of spectacles with very small frames re-glazed and that made things much better than the larger ones I’d been using.

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(I forgot this:)
The use of glasses with a VR set isn’t problematic in my experience as long as they are not ‘varifocal’. Glasses with short distance focus (e.g. for reading) should work fine.

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I need a pile of carpet and slats of timber, got it! Thanks.