The flight sim genre remains niche, so niche in fact that current gen gamers will know Sid Meier for RTS gaming whilst being oblivious of Wild Bill Stealey his co-legendary MicroProse co-founder. It was not always so, flight/space sims of all kinds, set in all eras once dominated video gaming as did their award winning designers and publishers.
The bane of flight sim developers and fans has always been the combination of setting up space to play flight sims, complex controller requirements. The absence of 1:1 or latency free headtracking hardware and of course cost ..
Setting up tri monitor or dual monitor displays also brings, inevitable driver issues and still leaves you with screen bezels, not to mention the heat created by these displays and you can hardly take the experience with you..
VR Ex Machina ?
The dream of flight sim developers and fans has always been to one day play games of this genre in VR .. or at least wearing a HMD..
HMDs promise to give you that large screen experience, one that does away with having to build a mission control centre for your favourite flight or space combat opera sim ..in theory..
With the arrival of simple to set up head mounted displays and on board or detachable low latency head tracking developers and gamers expect to see this respected genre literally taking flight once again.
Is this a realistic prospect? Let's buzz the tower of current HMD hype and take a look first using one of the most respected flight sims of our time Rise of Flight through LCD, LCOS and OLED HMD gaming goggles:
More than any genre the flight sim will test the mettle of HMD makers,for you are attempting to model and visually reproduce entire moving landscapes and environments, not just the linear set piece dark or light corridors of FPS games, or pseudo open world, but actually closed dungeon hubs of RPGs. Flight Sims seldom rely on close up battles with high polygon single enemies, they model flight of multiple perspective shifting foreground and background objects rendered over great distances. Can hmds even reproduce that kind of image fidelity ?
Oh and before we even get to that point, we also have to figure out how we can use 101 key combinations, foot pedals, yokes, and find the Enter key whilst entombed in our HMDs..
So we are asking if the flight sim is even viable on current or coming hmds: Not dreaming of the day they are possible but looking at what can be achieved right now: This is great as I get to cover a in detail and take apart several of the major issues relating to HMDS.. Including claimed field of view vs actual field of view, screen ratios, warping, resolution, scaling,optics,etc .. the reality of hmd gaming use as opposed to the virtual reality of the hype...
And what this means for developers who depending on the HMD they chose to support in game may have to do 0 additional work or end up rewriting games from scratch to accommodate that particular hmds method of displaying images.. or even an upgrade in it's hardware..
Rise of Flight hmd test 1 Oculus Rift Zeiss Headtracker 1080p sbs Tridef 3D
So what of the experience of playing a detailed flight sim like this on the Rift ?
Claimed Field of View vs Actual Field of View :
The Rift claims a 110 degree FOV In reality this is an occluded view, you look through a permanent circle/halo/tunnel . Warping does not remove this physical optical phenomenon.What you see through that the circle is the actual field of view that is possible to view on this hmd:
This Actual Field of View is further affected by scaling and screen resolution of the hmd display you use.
Importantly this sets the limit of what you as a developer or gamer can visually display or access in game using a HMD.
Once we wake up to the idea that HMDs have actual fields of view, that can be occluded or non occluded and quite different to claimed field of views we can then move on to consider:
HMD Field of View vs Flight Sim Field of View :
In PC flight sims we prefer to generate and enlarge FOV by tacking on monitors, achieving a truly wide non magnified optically or digitally FOV .... that we count in true and not scaled resolutions .. here for example is is ARMA III at 5120 by 1600 :
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| at 5120 by 1600 5:4 screen ratio all the text is discernible as well as a vast horizon |
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| you see the entire FOV not through a window or warping but clear corner pixel to corner pixel |
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| at 5120 by 1600 the guy sitting next to you .. is sitting next to you |
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| the ultra hi res means you see sunlight glimmering on waves and not white pixels blobs shimmering amidst blue pixel blobs... |
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| 5120 1600 16:10 screen ratio awesome FOV but how do we get this into a portable HMD for less than $300? |
When someone talks of wide FOVs in PC gaming we count those in real pixels and we expect to see an exponential increase in detail to create the simulation after spending 10K for the privilege. The view is non occluded i.e. you can see the whole FOV without anything entering your peripheral vision.Keep tacking on monitors, keep raising you true FOV.. In a flight sim this would mean we see more of the landscape around us, or more of the sky above us. Or the instrument panel below us ..
This true res wide FOV means distant objects can become discernible as real objects and not just blobs of pixels, you will also never see screen door or visible pixels with these ultra res wide screen setups. This kind of definition is crucial for our brains to resolve pixels into VR objects ..and not VR or HMD pixel blobs..
On the Rift the FOV is generated by magnifying a low res image or down scaling a higher res image ..but still to that low res screen.
Oculus Rift LCD 4:5 640 800 scaled 1080p sbs 3D
Using the Rift to play RoF we are experiencing a 1920 by 1080 1080p 3D 16:9 screen ratio game scaled to a 640 by 800 4:5 screen ratio LCD display. The FRAPs capture above is what the PC sees, not the user. The user experience is a totally different experience to the one if you were to run the above video on a 3D TV or other hmd..
So let's take a closer look at how the Rift generates it's Rise of Flight experience:
The effect of Oculus Rift Screen Ratio on a flight sim gaming world
On a HMD screen ratio can be more important than raw screen resolution. Dual display hmds like the Cinemizer OLED , smd ST1080 and Sony HMZT series use a 16:9 screen ratio. As a result even at high resolution (for hmds) images scale correctly without the need for warping or any additional effort required by a developer.
The Rift is a single display HMD,with a very different screen ratio to what developers and consumers are used to. In this iteration it is 4:5. To truly even reach a 1080p display the single Oculus Rift panel would have to be 4K or more in res. The current res is 640 by 800, a single 1080p panel would give 960 by 1080 a bizarre screen ratio of 8:9. When that Rift arrives as a developer your entire game world, intricately created and proportioned will have to be rejigged , re play tested to accommodate the scaling change alone, before you start dealing with the changes in optics and resolution and re-weighting the onboard headtracking. It will not be a simple jump up of resolutions as happened with our LCD displays, or if other hmds resolutions change (as happened with Doom 3?). More on this later
With the Rift your flight sim world and the planes flying around it are going to have maintain their correct aspect ratios within these 4:5, or 8:9 screen ratios. This is before you even consider what warping will do to the environment and the objects moving in and out of perspective in a sim..
Going Vertical
Magnifying a taller than wide screen is partly what gives this Rift it's vertigo and height effects, these work well in FPS games with large foreground or static near field background objects, say me looking at a character in Bioshock Infinite or looking up at a tree in ARMA.
3D appears in an almost in a model stage like cut out way, it works great for static objects and large objects in the vertical plane. In FPS games moving objects usually come at you from a short distance, in a room or even outside they do not have to fly off into a distant horizon reducing to a size of pixels.In a flight sim like RoF what you experience, is the plane's cockpit you are sitting in, struts, being taller, but the wings appearing stubbed..the foreground is fine ..it's what happens to distant objects that messes up the experience.
On the Rift you can counter this using a "warp" however then in addition to factoring hmd scaling you also have to consider:
The effect of the Oculus Rift's low resolution, visible pixel and screen door on Flight Sim Perspective
Adequate screen resolution and or scaling of resolution is essential to generate perspective . Perspective is vital to making you feel like you are flying towards or away from objects. Or that they occupy different depths in your field of view. On the Rift the low res, combining with large pixel size and screen door merge both foreground and background. This has many detrimental effects. Lets look at the causes:
Resolution :the 4:5 screen ratio 640 by 800 pixel count skews the game vertically but also means as we zoom out, or objects fly into the distance those objects are scaled into pixel blobs, almost Tetris like blocks.. This is before we apply a warp that will further skew the original vertical and horizontal dimensions of objects, even it were to correct them , they would still be pixel blobs and not planes simply because the screen ratio cannot scale 16:9 into 4:5 and importantly because are not enough pixels to render detail. If you are designing a Rift flight sim you will have to keep objects large and in close contact. Note the degeneration into pixel blobs at zoomed out distanced is not going to be fixed by a "faux 1080p" Rift as this problem is a function of both the low res and the screen ratio, a 8:9 screen ratio 960 by 1080 pixel count may throw up even more skewing and require more warping and completely different optics..
and this is before you take into account the:
Oculus Rift screen door
You see a chequerboard of black screen door uniformly spread across both foreground and background. In a flight sim that relies on separating foreground from background , this is a killer problem, you see the same black "holes" in the struts of the plane ,instrument panels and the ground below and it will merge both foreground and background ..
Oculus Rift large visible pixel size
The visible pixel size is what helps turn distant planes into dancing Tetris blocks ..
3D or 2D ?
A 3D display, using side by images requires us in a hmd at least to focus on the left right images being produced. If you then throw in the chequerboard visible pixel and screen door issues you lose the 3D effect. As your eyes move across the FOV you will focus on the pixels , or the screen door, this is enough to shatter the 3D illusion.
Put these issues together and we have an occluded wide field of view , skewed vertically low res screen door and visible pixel experience of Rise of Flight. One which is devoid of the vertigo you would expect and is largely a 2D experience thanks to the screen door , visible pixel mesh..
HMD Controller Blindness
Straight away playing using the Rift you feel the vertical scale of the environment and the cockpit. You'll have your very first OMG moment as soon as you hit the P key ... after lifting the Rift to find the P key.And this is the problem, flight sims require complex controls, in the Rift you are blind to these, I get round this by running Windows 8 speech recog in the background, or sighting the keyboard by lifting the Rift. But then that is hardly VR is it?
A good Flightstick is essential, to truly control a game like this though ultimately we need to see our actual hands holding the in game flight yoke, flipping the switches.
Once in an intense dog fight though you will not be able to sight or feel out individual keys or indeed combinations of keys.
How we control complex games like flight sims , from operating basic menus to throwing switches in cockpits has to radically change when using hmds to game..
Ergonomics and Rift Nausea
You see 30 minutes or so of sustained gameplay using the Rift in the above video, wearing the Astro A40s helps clamp the Rift , I do feel like my head is encased in foam. But I felt no nausea . Of course not everyone is going to be happy with almost 700g of bulk and weight on their heads. If any genre is going to make you hurl it will be the flight sim , you can see me pulling spins and turns trying to challenge the Rift nausea and frankly I did not feel any, you ca n see I noted I was having fun towards the end of the video.
So I did enjoy my Rift flight despite all the above observations , remember they are meant to be feedback!
Rise of Flight hmd test 2 Cinemizer OLED+ Zeiss Headtracker 1080p t/b Tridef 3D
Claimed FOV and Acutal FOV
The Cinemizer OLED + headtracker gives a totally visible non occluded FOV of a 40 inch display at 2 metres distance. The claimed FOV is the actual FOV. You see a 40 inch flat display perfectly clear from corner pixel to corner pixel.
This hmd has the finest optics of any current hmd solution. The HMZT series is also renowned for using OLED screens , however that has serious sweet spot issues and that is in static use not connected to a headtracker!
The Cinemizer is designed for motion and to maintain that quality of image cohesion and clarity during movement.
Screen ratio and resolution: Cinemizer OLED 16:9 872 500 scaled 1080p t/b 3D
The 1080p res scales amazingly well to the 16:9 OLED display with 0 visible pixels or screen door.
OLED benefits:
The superior colours and refresh rate make this the most beautiful rendition of Rise of Flight. All those glints from the Sun on on your plane structure, the water below, the colours of the fields etc..the rendition of Rise of Flight is actually more impressive than the FRAPs capture.
3D or 2D ?
This is definitely 3D , you can feel the height above ground , the depth of the environment . 3D is also most effective as the display is razor sharp, backgrounds do not merge with foreground as they can do on the Rift.
Ergonomics :
Low weight and excellent ergonomics also it make it the most comfortable. You have around 180g of hmd , easy to move around and track your foes as you can see in the video. The Zeiss headtracker is insanely accurate and has 0 latency , a league apart from off body headtracker arcs.
Rise of Flight's sound scape is dominated by wind, bullets and mosquito like buzzing flybys as a pesky foe darts around you . The Cinemizer earbuds are so light , you forget you are wearing them , so it does feel like the wind is rushing by you.
Immersion in VR is not just created through visual stimuli or an inflated FOV, sound and sound coming from earbuds you forget are there really places you in a gaming environment . Compared to the A40s this is VR heaven, you are always conscious of A40s presence and weight.
So in ear almost invisible earbuds prove essential for immersion .. and your face and head will thank you .. all that Rift Foam combined with Astro foam can get claustrophobic and if you are in a hot environment.. well it ain't rocket science..
HMD Controller Blindness :
I can easily look down from the Cinemizer to site keys, the joypad or that P key .. shouldn't stop developers making in game menus larger and games more HMD friendly though
Portable 3D OLED Rise of Flight
The whole experience is portable too, with one USB laptop cable for power as well as battery power.
As a developer you have to do nothing to get your game working with the Cinemizer OLED hmd. You can if you want also include DOF axes as well as using mouse emulation headtracking.
Rise of Flight hmd test 3 smd ST1080 Zeiss Headtracker native 1080p sbs Tridef 3D
Claimed FOV and Acutal FOV
The 100 inch display thrown up by the hmd is totally visible with no Rift like occlusion. You see a completely flat 100 inch display.
Scale, Screen ratio and resolution: ST1080 LCOS 16:9 1920 1080 true native 1080p sbs 3D.
Totally screen door and visible pixel free. The vertical size approaches that of the Rift image ( which is one that you see through a tube) the horizontal scale though far exceeds it as does the detail.
As a result of the raw res I can read every dial and the fine print on some of the dials , see every furrow in the fields below without the Rifts foibles I can feel the height as well as the planes structures sticking out of the picture.
3D or 2D? Definitely 3D .. you can feel the planes standing out from the screen as they rotate in the intro menu screen.
The scale of the 3D image combined with the native true 1080p resolution and 16:9 screen ratio make this a most impressive way to flight sim the closest to multi monitor desktop flight sim gaming but without the cost,bezels and in ghost free 3D.
I noticed early on in my hmd reviews, that true FOV immersion comes from the level of detail you see in a claimed FOV. Noting the true 1080p res 100 inch ST1080 produces more VR immersion than the 720p cinema sized HMZT series, a fact that holds true when comparing it to the Rift.. Unlike the Rift every detail is clear, there is no chequerboard of screen door and low res pixels that merges landscape with the aircraft structure killing depth of field.
The sound is the most powerful of all hmds of this generation.The colours are slightly off compared to the Cinemizer OLED and depending on your face this may fit less well, but at around 180g with the Zeiss headtracker tucked under the rear head tie, it is way more comfortable and tolerable than the Rift whilst producing an image of almost the same scale and vastly superior quality.
LCOS benefits
I was playing with the light blocker off in daylight too .. the image is so bright you won't notice the light blocker is off, unless you want to. The ST1080 has a 10% transparent display which means you can look through to site your keyboard or controllers.
Portable 3D 1080p Rise of Flight
Like the Cinemizer OLED you can run this using 1 USB cable, a mini USB cable connected to your PC or laptop.
As a developer you need do nothing to adapt your game to work with the smd ST1080, similarly for gamers this is the easiest hmd to connect supporting the widest formats of 3D.
So there we have it my first comparison of flight sim gaming across Rift, Cinemizer OLED and smd ST1080
It's not hard to see how HMDs like the Rift, Zeiss and smd could and should herald a Flight Sim renaissance we just have to be realistic as to what their individual strengths are.
More to follow ..
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Oculus Rift dev kit review part II : Why flight sim gaming in VR ain't like dustin' crops kid..
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