Of course flying sims for years (as long as they have existed really) preconditioned me against much of the motion sickness VR’ing a plane might induce while even a short demo of a ‘walking simulator’ had me turning green in mere seconds.
I found out how to get DCS to behave in VR. It turned out turning object shadows almost off made it not try to render every damn house with beautiful soft shadows and then it ran smooth as a babies butt. Blasting across the Caucasus in a Su-27 sure is something different from puttering along in an Il-2! Its amazing how easy these modern jets are to fly and land compared to their predecessors.
So yeah, roleplaying is fine in VR and we have some awesome RPG’s for VR already, they just all have you driving this thing or another :P
Hmm interesting. I had assumed (incorrectly obviously) that the amount of controls needed to fly DCS prohibited VR from being viable (cant see the keys with it on). Interesting!
The Su-27 doesn’t have a clickable pit as it’s not a fully rivet detailed plane like the A-10 or the other 3rd party planes so you can pretty much control it with nothing but your HOTAS.
It’s the clickable pit that makes it work in VR… you don’t need to see the keys. Your gaze controls the in-cockpit mouse pointer and you can assign HOTAS controls to fire off the mouse functions. Sure it’s less efficient than keys and likely to get you killed quicker in combat, but still a pretty cool feature. :)
Well, if you have an Oculus Rift, you can peek out the nose hole to see where the keyboard is. The Rift isn’t completely light-tight at the bottom. There is a gap at the nose both to accommodate different shapes and sizes and for a bit of ventilation. But as a side-effect, you can peek out of it a bit if you tilt your head up.
Another exciting thing is seeing the video of the touch controllers working in the cockpit. I don’t think they can make that work with HOTAS, but it will be very interesting if it ever comes to light.
Combined with the prototype touch gloves that we saw Zuckerberg trying at Oculus though…
So, there’s a great little title in the Oculus Store called Ultrawings that lets you grab the flight controls using Touch. Holding the virtual stick is exhilarating for a while. Woo-hoo!! Freedom! I can flick the magnetos with my fingers! I’m holding the actual flight stick!!!
And then 30 minutes in, you realize your arm is getting tired. And that there is no good way to give yourself some relief because you have to keep your grip on the stick and can’t relax a little and still stay in controlled flight. You have to keep your hand suspended in air squeezing the Touch.
I also miss having a return spring in a stick to give me haptic feedback / resistance to movement.
Yeah I have that as well. Hence why I’m looking forward to something like the gloves (if they ever happen) - you can use a real HOTAS, and still flip virtual switches.
I had to Google who he was, what an interesting story!
For those too lazy: German guy born with a rare genetic disorder that makes one arm much larger and denser than the other. Mother suggests arm wrestling, the rest is history, I like the part where he says something like, (paraphrasing) “I’m not a religious man, but I do feel like I was made to do this.”
As a part of the BUILD conference going on, Microsoft announced an upcoming VR headset from Acer which will be $399 and include motion controls + Inside-out tracking.
Inside-out tracking is what HoloLens currently uses (to great effect) to enable mapping a room and your movement around the room without depending on external trackers being placed around the room like Oculus and Vive currently require.
Not necessarily. If the gyro and other sensors are accurate enough, it could easily make the tracking “good enough” when they’re not in view, and when they are in your view, the sensors will be able to see the controllers.
It’s great! It’s sort of like Wii Sports for VR, but with much better controllers. The games are all simple fun, not the sort of thing that’s going to deeply engage you, but all of them are easy to pick up and are an enjoyable way to spend time with friends.
It’s way better if you can play with people you know. It’s been easy for me to find people to do stuff with I don’t know, and that’s usually been a positive experience, but I had a much better time with people I was friends with in real life.
In line with that, another real fun multiplayer game is Smashbox Arena which is Dodgeball, I guess, but with powerups and guns. It’s the closest to the fun of playing a FPS I’ve had. But since it’s in VR and we’re not all badasses, it plays out at a much slower pace. It’s really satisfying to sneak up behind a friend who’s carefully aiming a shot and then getting hit from behind by another friend who was sneaking up on you.
