I’m very curious about this. How do you manipulate flight controls with the headset on? Do you go by feel or is there a matching representation in the virtual world?
Personally, I don't have a HOTAS, I just an XBox controller and of course the VR controller.
The cockpit is interactable with the VR controllers. You can reach forward and push buttons and turn knobs. It's a bit awkward, but it's doable.
I'll typically hold the XBox controller in my left hand to control the flight stick and have a VR controller on my right hand to interact with everything else in the cockpit. It does get awkward though when I need to use the rudder or brakes, though, since in a real airplane, those are controlled by pedals. I have to try to press buttons on my XBox controller on my right hand while still holding the VR controller.
Ohhh! Ok that’s cool. I can see having a yoke and pedals then using VR control for the rest. How fiddly are the VR controls? Can you reasonably set a radio frequency or control the autopilot?
It's been a long time and I only did it a little bit.
Buttons are easy enough to work with, same with levers. Dials were hard though because the normal human behavior is to pinch a dial, but in VR, you can only really grab, and knowing where exactly the game will deal with your grab on a small dial is tricky, especially if it's an autopilot dial with nested dials.
It'd probably work better if I had a VR system that had hand detection rather than needing controllers.
Speaking from my experience (a lot of DCS, 10s of hours in VTOL VR, couple hours in MSFS2020, all in VR), if you have HOTAS controllers, it feels natural to use them, without seeing them.
Actually, my biggest grip with VTOL VR is the fact that the developer is hellbent on using vr controllers instead of joystick and throttle, which even with the best tracking (valve index) is miles away from precision of a good hotas
Cool! My interest in flight sims is more GA than military so I don’t think HOTAS is as appropriate there but I can definitely see that military flight sims are the killer VR app.
Could something like Apple Vision Pro work in an AR capacity so I can still see my physical controls?
I don't know about apple but I've seen some videos of people using pass trough in Meta 3 - here is a guy that has built an A-10C cockpit at home https://youtu.be/KwOKr8QrJA4
