If Oculus results on a success, a lot of your lateral controls will still be useful but you won't see all those nice panel instruments anymore.

Whatcha gonna do?

castAR might be a better fit for someone with an instrumented pit.

They got a nice shot in the financial arm recently...
http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/19/castar...gaming-glasses/

Likely pass through cameras that allow a form of AR won't be far off. At that point I predict greenscreen HUD, MFD's, canopies and mirrors and instrument faces etc, similar to how one would implement CastAR with retroreflective material.

Kick ass physical cockpits will remain relevant and still be the envy of other simmers, but I suspect most will be bare bones. I also suspect there will be a huge surge in people using cockpits of sorts, and that demand may bring some interesting new products to the market as large swaths of people are bitten by the immersion bug.

My idea:

A physical cockpit that contains no instruments, switches etc. but which closely matches the dimensions of the virtual cockpit in the sim. You wear hand tracking gloves so that when you reach out and touch a switch in the sim you see your hand move to the switch and at the point where it touches the surface of physical cockpit you're sitting in it also touches the virtual cockpit of the sim.

I don't think Oculus will be such a big hit for flight simmers. First-person shooters will be all over Oculus though. The need to reference charts, mission cards, etc. means flight simmers cannot have the entire view blocked out, so CastAR seems like a better choice for flight simmers... or until the hand-tracking glove is developed.

My entire reason for wanting Oculus (or HTC Vive, haven't decided yet) is for flight sims. "reference charts, mission cards, etc." are usually presented in game anyway.

I guess that would depend on what sim you are playing.

The Oculus and Vive will be perfect for most flight simmers "IF" the resolution is good enough. Instead of looking a monitor in your game room, you'll be in the cockpit of your favorite aircraft looking down thru the clouds and saying "Holy Shyte I'm a long way up."

I still have hope that the Oculus's resolution might be good enough. According to Palmer, the custom displays being built for the CV1 Rift by Samsung, are better than the ones in the latest Rift headsets shown at the latest tech shows. Even if the resolution isn't higher, any improvement to the ppi or smaller spaces between the pixels will certainly help.

I would imagine once Vive announces their final specs and release date, Oculus will announce their final specs, and open up the Rift to preorders. I won't make up my mind until I see the final specs, and content available. Palmer has just stated the Rift will be more than 350 dollars and why..http://www.roadtovr.com/...but it still should be much cheaper than the Vive as flight simmers will be able to buy a Rift without the cost of the inputs that we won't require.

Think I'm going to hold off for a few years. This tech will only get better but I feel the first few versions of these new VR headsets will have great "wow" factor when using them but little actual benefit to gameplay due to lack of resolution.

I'll give them a few versions and they will nail it and it will be amazing.

I think it�s already amazing. Keep in mind the below was 2 years ago on DK2:

I think the immersion more than makes up for any loss in resolution.

With this idea, the user could paste stickers with various icons/codes on the surfaces of the blank cockpit and these codes are then interprited by the AR camera which presents whatever visual entity tied to that code.

This way the user can create its own cockpit by pasting these stickers (representing various panels, screens, instruments etc) at free will.
I also suspect a system like this would ease the development some. Maybe?

You guys need to check out FlyInside FSX (and P3D). It's an awesome add-on that gives GREAT Rift support to both FSX and P3D. The kicker is that it ALSO supports the leap motion controller. This will allow you to manipulate virtual cockpit controls with your hands. At some point I hope to see it evolve enough that you can use a "dark" cockpit as F4UDash4 had suggested.

Check it out: https://flyinside-fsx.com/

g.

Here's a great vid a guy did explaining Flyinside FSX then comparing it with a real flight over the same terrain in the same plane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30pSJ0wOB6U

Resolution is 1080 X 1200 on each eye. Most monitors works at those resolutions.

I don't think the stickers would be necessary. Well, maybe one just to sync the physical cockpit to the virtual cockpit at startup. The glove would be tracked by the VR HMD positional tracking system and would determine when your virtual fingertip was interacting with a virtual switch. The physical cockpit idea is simply to give tactile feedback to the player, instead of reaching into empty space and flipping a switch your fingertip would actually touch a hard surface.

Of course it would be ridiculous to have multiple physical cockpits to match each different virtual cockpit in a sim like DCS, so a generic cockpit would need to be used to represent all.

This probably warranted a more detailed analisys to state my point. But I'll keep it simple to start.
If you take 1920x1200 monitor and run on it the kind of Vertical FoV (I mention Vertical fov because most of the 2x1080 horizontal resolution on the rift is overlaping so not directly comparable) the rift is running I would not be able to see see or hit #%&*$#, in say DCS to mention just one. Sure it's great for flying around but when you need to make out those fine details (ground targets), you won't.

Sapper, that may be true for the DK2 (960x1080 per eye - one screen), but I doubt that's the case with the CV1. It's my understanding that the CV1 uses two panels, so you're not losing half your horizontal resolution. (The panels are AFAIK, 1920x1200 or better, each.)

Being able to see and hit targets is actually pretty easy, even in the DK2. Warthunder is a fun proving ground for working on your VR air combat skills.

g.

Gene,

Do You have the DK2? How is Cliffs with them?

Gene, the CV1 has been confirmed to be 1080x1200 with the displays in portait configuration.

That doesn't make it a 1080x1200 display. It's a 1200x1080 display rotated.

Audillo, I've got a DK2, yes. I haven't tried Cliffs of Dover with it - I suspect I won't get around to it until after the CV1 is out.
Flying through the mountains in DCS is a scream though.

g.