Why Virtual Reality for BMS would improve the experience by order of magnitudes.
-
It’s going to be a ton of work for sure, but the rewards would be immense, enough to be worth pursuing.
+1,000!! BMS unfit for VR, VR unfit for BMS, but if we can pull this off –- pure awesomeness!
-
So you said, but I was hoping you could expand on that rather than restating it. Perhaps provide examples? Explaining the view instead of (or as well as) sharing it?
Examples? Like when flying in a valley and preparing for a pop-up bombing, in A-G mode and operating the MFD’s, and the RWR wakes up with an enemy plane looking at you from 1 o’clock, and you frantically look over your shoulder while rapidly pressing the A-A button, and hovering your finger above the stores release while trying to figure out if you need to abort and engage?
Anytime things get intense and task loading increases, the limitations of the input system become apparent. And the mouse is out the window VERY quickly.
VR compounds this by blocking view to physical inputs and having too low resolution for the outputs. The resolution is just a technology issue. In five years that may well be no problem anymore. Depending on what kind of VR solutions dominate the market. But it will still block the ability to see external inputs, barring messy camera solutions which at present do nothing but cause problems and nausea.
-
That has nothing to do with VR. You can do all that with VR, same as if you are blindfolded.
Sent from my SM-N910G using Tapatalk
-
That has nothing to do with VR. You can do all that with VR, same as if you are blindfolded.
Maybe if you have a physical button that you can “feel” for and hover your finger over. Harder to do with a touchscreen. Same as touchtyping… you can do it easily and blindfolded with an ergonomic keyboard and while you can do it on an iPad, the results on the iPad will not be the same as with the keyboard.
-
That has nothing to do with VR. You can do all that with VR, same as if you are blindfolded.
I can’t do any of that blindfolded.
-
Nobody can do that. People stating they can are lying to themself.
-
Ok, but would you guys be interested in a custom flight helmet style mounted VR that allowed you to look under at your cockpit/peripherals like NVGs are used IRL?
-
Ok, but would you guys be interested in a custom flight helmet style mounted VR that allowed you to look under at your cockpit/peripherals like NVGs are used IRL?
No. Nosepeeking is a brutal immersion killer.
What will probably work well is something like Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality system, which will allow for showing the aircraft surroundings above the cockpit, and show anything below straight through as if there was nothing there. And no, using a camera on the VR system to overlay is not even remotely the same thing.
-
No. Nosepeeking is a brutal immersion killer.
That makes no sense to me especially if you have a full cockpit. Also “nosepeeking” is exactly what you have to do IRL with NVGs. I’m not talking the current gaps, I talking a completely open bottom.
Just showing for reference because I’m not sure everybody has got this when I threw it out before. Obivously with VR you would fill in the sides and the top, but shoot for the same amount of under space. I also think in the long run helmet mounted VR would be more comfortable despite how long for me a personal limit was not to wear a helmet while flight simming -
That makes no sense to me especially if you have a full cockpit.
That is because you’ve never done it.
Also “nosepeeking” is exactly what you have to do IRL with NVGs. I’m not talking the current gaps, I talking a completely open bottom.
No. It’s not. You don’t see a room around you when you peek out under NVG’s.
-
I can’t do any of that blindfolded.
Can you detail exactly what of this you couldn’t do blindfolded, and exactly why? I see no reason for why you’d need to see either your mouse or keyboard in the scenario Wolf said you can do blindfolded. No insults intended, if you can’t flip the Missile/Dogfight switch and click the Emergency Jettison without looking at your HOTAS and mouse first, you should actually see a doctor about that.
-
That makes no sense to me especially if you have a full cockpit.
That is because you’ve never done it.
No. It’s not. You don’t see a room around you when you peek out under NVG’s.
I have a little, but I do have a lower realism cockpit around me. All I’m seeing is the stuff under it which for me is my other monitors, MFDs, HOTAS, etc., not really getting much of the rest of the room.
-
Can you detail exactly what of this you couldn’t do blindfolded, and exactly why?
Push the ICP buttons on my touch screen and hover with my finger over the jettison stores button on the touch screen while looking over my shoulder for an enemy aircraft.
I see no reason for why you’d need to see either your mouse or keyboard in the scenario Wolf said you can do blindfolded.
Me either. What I need is my ICP and a button on the dashboard.
No insults intended, if you can’t flip the Missile/Dogfight switch and click the Emergency Jettison without looking at your HOTAS and mouse first, you should actually see a doctor about that.
I wouldn’t look at either my HOTAS or my mouse. But if I need my mouse for it, I would definitely need to look at the mouse pointer, which would require locking my head in place forward while I hover over the jettison button - which would make it impossible to look for the enemy aircraft at the same time. And in the scenario I provided, I wouldn’t use the HOTAS switch. It’s just stressful, not immediate. I can see why someone who does not have a touch screen would use the HOTAS switch though, but to me that is yet one more argument against having less interfaces.
I should add that when I fly NOE letting go of the stick is not an option, and I can’t use my mouse quickly with my left hand - so using that to click on ICP and Jettison is not really an option no matter what.
-
So this thread is really just actually back to people with MFDs, apps, etc. (a minority) telling us that VR isn’t working because its incompatible with their setups?
-
I wouldn’t look at either my HOTAS or my mouse. But if I need my mouse for it, I would definitely need to look at the mouse pointer, which would require locking my head in place forward while I hover over the jettison button - which would make it impossible to look for the enemy aircraft at the same time. And in the scenario I provided, I wouldn’t use the HOTAS switch. It’s just stressful, not immediate. I can see why someone who does not have a touch screen would use the HOTAS switch though, but to me that is yet one more argument against having less interfaces.
I should add that when I fly NOE letting go of the stick is not an option, and I can’t use my mouse quickly with my left hand - so using that to click on ICP and Jettison is not really an option no matter what.
You dont use the mouse for the operations described instead, you press the ICP buttons and punch the emergency jettison button. Obviously if you dont have those physical parts in front of you, you will find it hard to do blindfolded. Touchscreen or mouse.
Letting go of the stick is not an option any time, unless you are on the ground. Its no coincidence that almost everything you need to adjust in flight, is on the left hand side of the craft… taking the hand off the throttle is okay. Hand off the stick? risky… depends what you are doing.
And as for punching buttons in the ICP while flying NOE? Also not an option. If you are doing something that requires inside the cockpit work at that level, there is a single response to all your problems - climb to cope.
-
So this thread is really just actually back to people with MFDs, apps, etc. (a minority) telling us that VR isn’t working because its incompatible with their setups?
Seems that way to me too. I doubt VR will be forced on anyone. If you’d rather go for the IRL immersion than VR immersion then cool. Likewise, VR rather than IRL? Also cool.
I hope the devs will see the popularity of VR in other cockpit sims and consider adding support in BMS. DCS is stunning in the Rift. Is it perfect? No. Far from it (personally think CV1 should have been called DK3…). You can’t read any labels for switches in the cockpit and the MFDs are slightly hard to read, same goes for the smaller gauges. It’s still an amazing thing to experience.
I don’t see any harm in people registering their votes for VR to be considered. Even with all of the concerns & issues that will need to be worked out, surely it’s worth at least thinking about the feature? At least then we can all work together to resolve any of the issues that might crop up.
Cheers,
Del.
-
You dont use the mouse for the operations described instead, you press the ICP buttons and punch the emergency jettison button. Obviously if you dont have those physical parts in front of you, you will find it hard to do blindfolded. Touchscreen or mouse.
Not hard. Impossible. With actual physical buttons I would find it hard, as I do not spend the enormous amount of time getting it into my subconscious that real fighter pilots do. I have a job, and other hobbies, and not that much drive. If I did, I would be a fighter pilot.
Letting go of the stick is not an option any time, unless you are on the ground. Its no coincidence that almost everything you need to adjust in flight, is on the left hand side of the craft… taking the hand off the throttle is okay. Hand off the stick? risky… depends what you are doing.
Which is why the mouse is a horrid choice for me. Perhaps not for others. But I find it slow and error prone to use with my left hand.
And as for punching buttons in the ICP while flying NOE? Also not an option. If you are doing something that requires inside the cockpit work at that level, there is a single response to all your problems - climb to cope.
Perhaps not if you use the mouse. With a physical ICP, or even a touch screen, no problem. No need to climb. In fact, last time that happened, I went lower to avoid detection while I punched stuff into the ICP.
And that is why I won’t replace that with VR.
-
I don’t see any harm in people registering their votes for VR to be considered. Even with all of the concerns & issues that will need to be worked out, surely it’s worth at least thinking about the feature? At least then we can all work together to resolve any of the issues that might crop up.
The first issue that crops up is that some of the modern VR libraries, like the Oculus Rift one, do not work with DirectX 9.
That makes it a lot of work to implement VR support. I would much rather see that work go into improving the sim.
-
So this thread is really just actually back to people with MFDs, apps, etc. (a minority) telling us that VR isn’t working because its incompatible with their setups?
Yep. One solution to the MFD problem is putting the MFD’s where they physically exist in the cockpit. Then the screen view of your pilot (BMS MFD’s) would match up with the actual position of your MFDs on your desk. In BMS you still wouldn’t necessarily see your virtual hands, but that isn’t required. Just the same as you can close your eyes, extend your arms out to your sides, and still manage to touch your finger to your nose without looking. Your brain knows where your body is. If the virtual space matches up with your physical space, you’ll be able to use the MFD’s without much trouble.
Touchscreens are more of a difficult issue, with the obvious lack of tactile feedback. Not an unsolvable problem by any means, but one that requires a bit more work. That’s presuming that the people interested in VR already have those other things, which they certainly may or may not have.
There are plenty of ways VR can work, and plenty of other games which will use VR other than BMS. The more people who buy into VR, the more software titles you’ll see either upgrade to support it, or include it from the start.
So don’t let anyone talk you out of buying VR if you want it. It doesn’t have to work for their setup - it only has to work for you.
-
I have been aware of VR since around 1990 when it was about to be the next big thing.
We’re a lot further on now than we were then of course. I don’t doubt that todays VR would be ideal for a non complex flight sim. The issue isn’t whether VR works, it’s whether it works for a complex sim. And when I say works with it, I mean whether it works without having to use workarounds.
I have no doubt that will happen. And when it does it will be a very good thing. The technology to have proper three dimensional finger tracking is already out there. However the only package I’m aware of currently that can do that seems to be forward facing only. But when you can match up a VR headset with the ability to reach out and touch buttons and rotate dials that will be when VR is truly compatible with complex simulations such as BMS.
I don’t think anyone in this thread is against VR, because it’s not compatible with their setups, or for any other reason.
I do wish that people who are invested in VR would dial some of their enthusiasm back. I don’t think it does anyone any favours to turn the discussion about it into a confrontation.