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
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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
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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:
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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