Flying a FSD P-38K in Virtual Reality from the Palm Springs Air Museum

Took a FSD P-38K up from the Palm Springs Air Museum for a virtual reality flight around Palm Springs.

 

FSX:SE, FlyInside, and the HTC Vive. Guys, VR is amazing for flight simulation now! You can almost be there. It looks just as if you are.

 

 

Or the direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6iKSgeaF-M

Robert great plane this was my mothers favorite plane when she was a teenager squadrons would fly over all the time in Chicago. Until I moved to a small town in AZ, I volunteered for 19 yrs at Planes Of Fame Chino Ca airshows & some 9 yrs for the museum on Saturday's one of the best times I ever had. My mother (RIP) saw for the first time in her life close up to a P-38 and heard pilots talk. I downloaded freeware "Glacier Girl" on this site amazing plane great detail check it out. I enjoyed the video, but having two screens side by side of the same thing was hard, and no outside shots. But good video other then that. Kenny

Hi Kenny,

 

The P-38 has always been my favorite too! That art-deco styling and Kelly Johnson's brilliant design. They are beautiful! I also love the Glacier Girl story. Phenominal bit of recovery and rebuild work!

 

The two screens are actually slightly different. The left one is what the left eye sees and same for the right image and the right eye. In VR you wear the displays like goggles and each display is what each eye would see if you were really there. You get full depth perception and 3D. Pause the video when in the cockpit and then compare the edges of the two images. The right eye sees close up things a little farther right and the left eye sees close up things a little farther left. Just like in real life. The lensing in the headset also removes the weird wide angle distortion you see in the images here. That's because what is being rendered and shown is about 110 degrees of field of view give or take. Everything looks rectilinear and proportioned properly without distortions when you see these scenes in a VR headset.

 

Plus each image just about fills your field of view so these images replace your surroundings. You no longer see your desk and monitor. You see the world of FSX and the cockpit of whatever plane you are flying.

 

It is a bit hard on the eyes to try to see both images without wearing a VR headset of some kind, but if you view this in something like Google Cardboard, you can get a small part of the effect. The field of view is way too narrow and wrong and instead of your own head movements, you are stuck with mine which can make people ill. But these are the stereo images I see. If you cross your eyes and get a center image, that center image will be in stereo except it will be backwards. Your brain can make sense of it mostly but that will cause headaches after a while.

 

The best way if you don't have Cardboard is just make the video full screen and ignore one or the other image.

 

For me, though, what I see is what it would look like sitting in that plane. It's as if I was really in the cockpit and everything is full sized. You can even taxi past other planes and leave just a feet between your wing and theirs because you see the full depth like if you were actually taxiing the plane. Patterns and approaches get easy and it's easy to judge altitude and descent.

 

But the best way to do it is to see it for yourself. Only then does this stuff really make sense. When you fly in VR, it's as if you were really doing it and not just looking at a 3D projection on a 2D screen. You see a full 3D world that is 1:1 scale. It's really amazing. ;-)