While there are flight simmers who use VR, somewhat counter intuitively it's not really a good match. Also, it's a tiny market from a $$$ standpoint.
In a flight sim you have lots of dials in the cockpit you need to look at, and long viewing distances outside the window. None of the VR headsets I've tried have had good enough resolution to have a clear view on the cockpit instruments. The combination of cockpit very near and long viewing distances is also a bad recipe for motion sickness.
And then there's the controls. With a VR headset you can't see your hands or your controllers. With a hands on throttle and stick controller (HOTAS) you can fly around just fine, but when you need to toggle flaps or landing gear or navigation instruments, it's difficult to find the right button for that with a headset on.
So VR is ok for casual flying around, maybe even some dogfighting or aerobatics with simplified aircraft models. But once you need to deal with aircraft systems or navigation instruments, you're better off with triple screens and/or head tracking.
I’m curious: in racing sims, in a three-monitor setup, the side view is extremely skewed due to perspective. They are there just to provide a sense of space and peripheral vision, but you’re supposed to look to the center monitor the majority of the time.
Is that not the case for flight sim setups? I can’t imagine looking at a horribly stretched image on a side window to be a nice experience.
While I've never set things up that detailed for myself, I'm aware of many multi-screen flight sim setups. The general effect aimed for is that each screen shows the accurate perspective that you would see if you turned your head in that direction from the cockpit seat you're 'sitting in'.
Edge of screen mappings can be a little tricky but the higher level rendering engines can make near seamless transitions.
Military and commercial simulators try for displays that absolutely minimize visual artifact distractions so the experience is as close to sitting in the seat as possible.
> None of the VR headsets I've tried have had good enough resolution to have a clear view on the cockpit instruments.
Have you tried the Index? It used to be bad on the Vive, but Xplane with the Valve Index finally made it possible for me to see the instruments without squinting.
It sounds like you're expecting VR to make a difference to the landscape or such. If you're in a flying plane, everything outside the plane is so far away that you don't get any depth information from stereoscopy. VR could be nice for the cockpit and takeoff/landing, but it doesn't seem essential.
There's more to immersion than stereoscopy. All the different elements of VR (3DOF tracking, positional tracking, 360 imaging, hand/controller tracking, stereoscopy) work together to flip a switch in your brain that tells it that you are in something rather than merely looking at something.
Even simply covering the entirely of your 360 range of view is enormous on it's own for flight sims. Think of the $$$ that sim enthusiasts spend on multi-monitor setups.
VR makes a big difference if you don't have one of these crazy multi-screen setups. It is not about depth perception, more like just being able to look at your sides naturally.
The advantage is in being able to move your head to see more than what is directly head of you.
Maybe they could do something like how in Elite Dangerous you hold middle mouse button(? can't remember exactly what the control is) to freelook, but that's not as good as being able to control your PoV directly by moving your head.
