Flying the (Free!) MilViz Red Bull P-38 in Virtual Reality in the HTC Vive!

[Guest Robert455]

 

Or the direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXCJpMer5ok

[mrzippy]

Do you actually see 2 screens split like that or is this how VR is displayed for Youtube?

[Guest Robert455]

That's how it is captured. It's a right eye and left eye stereo pair and the right eye sees the right image and the left eye sees the left image.

 

The wide angle distortion is to precorrect for the way the lenses in the headsets present the images to the eyes with about 110 degrees of field of view. It's like having ski goggles on to a large extent. The virtual world mostly fills what you can see but not quite.

 

But in the VR headset, we see everything in full stereo with full 3D. We see the depth, feel the speed, the airplanes are imposing because they are big, feel the altitude, instinctively look into the turns, and so on. It's the damnedest thing I've ever experienced. I'm not flying a simulator. I'm in the cockpits of these planes and flying them around in the virtual world as if it was real. It's very hard to describe since it doesn't sound possible, but you feel like you are in the airplane and see everything as if you were really there.

 

People with things like Google Cardboard or GearVR can view these videos and see kind of what it looks like to us in the headsets but they will have a little chromatic aberration and some residual distortion since these are not optimized for their lenses.

[Guest Robert455]

And after all of that, I don't think I answered your question directly. In the headset you do see the two screens but only one eye sees each image. It's somewhat like looking at a Viewmaster in that there are two images there. One for each eye. But your brain combines them into a single stereo view. Unlike a Viewmaster, though, we have a very wide field of view, full head tracking for a 360, 360, 360 degree virtual display, etc.