Oculus and Flyinside experience

All things CV1 and Flyinside related.

Moderators: Tony, Sharkku

Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby whoispankaj » Fri Jun 10, 2016 2:36 pm

My Oculus Rift Experience with P3D

My name is Pankaj. As mentioned in the lounge forum, I luckily got hold of Oculus Rift at one of the local best buy store..Yeah even before the guys with pre-order(some teasing here).I was quite excited to try it with P3D after I reached home.. Here is my experience:

1) My system is a i-7 4670k overclocked to only 4.3Gzh, Nvidia 980Ti 6gb card, 8gb ram.
2. P3D is set up with sliders to 3/4th of maximum for most except for autogen and vegetation to normal. I did not use cloud shadows at all.
3. I used A2A comanche, PMDG 737-800 and PMDG 777-200 with default livery.
4. Used the Flyinside demo version , which works for 15 mins.
5. I also had the Active Sky Running with Rex textures(2k-4k ones)

PMDG 737-800
-------------------------
First of all I was very excited to see myself in the 737 cockpit.Oh my my..It was a completely different feeling sitting in the cockpit on the runway.
You feel the presence. You feel that you are quite above the ground. I never got this feeling on the 2d monitor.You do not get the feeling of depth.
But with oculus, you just felt sitting quite above the runway.

The bigger dials like altitude window, speed etc on the MCP are easy to read. The smallers ones are a little tough.But if you know your airplane,
you could guess correctly.For the first time I could look at the PFD and in front as if i am sitting in the cockpit.
The PFD is not much readable.But you could guess the speed tape and you could easily do an ILS approach.You can see the diamonds good enough. But smaller details on PFD are a little tough to read by default. I havent tried the zoom feature in Flyinside but i guess that should make it easy to zoom in to read the text.

A resolution of 2k/eye will help with this a lot. And with 4k/eye, it should look like what we see on the desktop.

PMDG 777-200
---------------------------------------

Same feelings as the 737 except now you feel that you are really high above the runway. The whole experience was smooth even with addons such as FlightBeam KSFO HD and active sky running. The only lag i felt when i would move my head to left or right quickly. I could see a refresh lag along the edges of the lens. But nothing distracting.
I could only go upto FL 180 due to the demo version time limit of 15 mins. But the scenery looks a lot bland. But for an airliner that was an ok deal for me. As long i could make an approach and find the runway.

A2A Comanche:
-----------------------------------
One of my biggest issue, with current 2D flight sim monitors, was that I could not set up my view point to make it realistic. I had done a 1hr introductory flight in cessna .And I could feel that my cockpit was at a good height from the ground. Its similar to the way you feel if you move from driving a sedan car to a truck or a Uhaul. You feel quite above the ground. But when i had my oculus rift on, it was an AHA moment. This was exactly how my real flying session felt.
The dials are not much readable .But you could guess them pretty much.
For the first time I felt that i had lined up while doing the approach. You had no second guesses. That was an awesome feeling.

Dan's software Flyinside does a lot of magic behind the scenes. For an IT guy like me who likes the read a book, I am hoping the Import external window in Flyinside can help.
I havent tested that though.You could do a complete 8hr flight while flying the 777 and reading a PDF copy of a book.

For people who are very new to Flight sim,not sure if this would be worth it, I would say hold on till we have atleast 2k/eye resolution. For the people who know their aircraft well, love flight simming and who are just bordering on whether to go ahead, please do go ahead for the immersion factor.It might not help you fly on pilotedge with real ATC and do all the stuff quickly .But it will give you that needed immersion.

Overall I am quite very happy and excited with Flyinside and Oculus. I jsut wish Dan could add a mini ipad where i could watch a movie inside my cockpit.. :)

Pankaj
whoispankaj
 
Posts: 47
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2016 5:37 pm

Re: Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby ianwild » Mon Jun 13, 2016 4:21 pm

On that last point, I really want to be able to use Foreflight in my Virtual Cockpit so having a way to either VNC to my iPad, or run an iPad emulator and display within Flyinside would be pretty awesome. Has anyone ever got this working (without needing to Jailbreak the iPad - I got bored with that years ago)?
ianwild
 
Posts: 15
Joined: Thu Feb 11, 2016 5:16 am

Re: Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby whoispankaj » Mon Jun 13, 2016 6:28 pm

I thought of coming back here with some important points for consideration(after posting a couple of forum posts) :
1. Initially i thought that I was running with my P3D settings of sliders at 3/4th the maximum value.But it looks like the FlyInside P3D comes with its own default settings which are on the low end for the simulator to run smoothly.
2. flyInside shares the same memory space with the P3D.As per Dan, it also consumes some VAS. So you might want to lower down your settings to accomodate this. You could run into OOM very quickly even with A2A addons. Just another reason for P3D to go 64bit..
3. The rotating clouds issue in P3D becomes very obvious with oculus rift in the 3D world.And it can cause a little bit of disorientation feelings(for the lack of a better word) with oculus rift.

Pankaj
whoispankaj
 
Posts: 47
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2016 5:37 pm

Re: Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby whoispankaj » Mon Jun 13, 2016 6:30 pm

ianwild, if you can vnc to your ipad from the desktop, then you could try importing that window into oculus rift.Did you try that?

Pankaj
whoispankaj
 
Posts: 47
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2016 5:37 pm

Re: Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby miaig » Wed Jun 15, 2016 4:58 pm

Hi Pankaj, I would be interested to know what kind of frame rate you get on your setup.
Thanks,
miaig
miaig
 
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Jun 13, 2016 12:59 pm

Re: Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby ianwild » Wed Jun 15, 2016 6:38 pm

whoispankaj wrote:ianwild, if you can vnc to your ipad from the desktop, then you could try importing that window into oculus rift.Did you try that?

Pankaj


I thought about it but couldn't find a VNC server that runs on an iPad without a jailbreak. I may be missing it but I've searched enough and didn't find much. The other thought was an iPad emulator, however I couldn't find one that would run foreflight. Still looking though. I guess I gave up somewhat when I realised how bad the resolution would be, making it pretty useless for what I wanted to do. The GTN 750 is at least a reasonable moving map, however I'm moving back to the Track-IR now for my IFR practice and Pilotedge.

Ian
ianwild
 
Posts: 15
Joined: Thu Feb 11, 2016 5:16 am

Re: Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby whoispankaj » Wed Jun 15, 2016 8:11 pm

Hi miag,

I normally get around 45-50fps p3d wise and a little above 90 flysinside wise..

Pankaj
whoispankaj
 
Posts: 47
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2016 5:37 pm

Re: Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby whoispankaj » Wed Jun 15, 2016 8:18 pm

ianwild wrote:however I'm moving back to the Track-IR now for my IFR practice and Pilotedge.

Ian

Yeah for pilotedge you will have to get off oculus..something that i mentioned in my post. A2A Cessna 182 was pretty much readable and using binocular mode can be helpful. Just that you might need a little more practise with oculus.But you could still have a chance after practising to use the binocular mode.give it a shot..

Pankaj
whoispankaj
 
Posts: 47
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2016 5:37 pm

Re: Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby ianwild » Thu Jun 16, 2016 4:35 pm

Agreed that the A2A 182, with the view moved forward slightly, can get us to a just about readable set of gauges and I've got binocular view pretty much down now I think. Plus the GTN makes the radios easy enough to tune (with my fat fingers using the leap no less), but the big issue for me now is to brief an approach plate without taking the headset off. My pilotedge flying is pretty much all IFR approach practice and I'd love to find a way to do all the SRM in a way that replicates a real flight.

Cheers,

Ian
ianwild
 
Posts: 15
Joined: Thu Feb 11, 2016 5:16 am

Re: Oculus and Flyinside experience

Postby flipfloppity » Tue Aug 02, 2016 8:00 pm

Hello,

Newbie flight simmer here. I'm looking to use FlyInside + PilotEdge to get the best possible immersive experience as well as practice talking to controllers, but a few of the comments above seem to suggest that this won't work? I'm not too familiar with the requirements for realistic ATC practice, but I do know that I'd like to progress to the point where I can practice IFR approaches. Is the problem that you can't write stuff on a kneeboard / read an approach plate? If so, have any work-arounds been developed since this thread was posted? Would use of the Vive's front facing camera possible help solve some of these issues? Any input from those more experienced would be much appreciated. Thanks!
flipfloppity
 
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2016 7:54 pm

Next

Return to Oculus Rift CV1

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest