Need advice on a VR headset for someone who never had one

[Sryan]

@jack72

Also, what about motion sickness. I don’t know if I will suffer from this, but I don’t really want to go through all the trouble and expense to find out that I can’t use it because I get motion sickness all the time.

Good question! I think that nearly everyone is able to enjoy VR, as long as you ease your experience into it. Start with some milder experiences, and stop if you start to feel a little queefy. With time, you’ll be able to enjoy virtual dogfights without starting to feel bad at all.

@jack72

How easy is it to use with a Virpil HOTAS, What do you do when you need to press buttons in the cockpit and the VR headset is on.

So there’s some options here. First of all, many headsets have a little nosegap. When you tilt your head backwards a little and look down so you can see your nose, you can look outside of this gap and see where you’re going with your hands in the real world. For me, this is more than good enough to get a plane started up with just the mouse. I personally have a pair of thrustmaster MFD’s, that I can locate purely from muscle memory. the combination of the throttle, stick and the MFD buttons is usually more than enough to fly any HOTAS/MFD plane. For planes that don’t have these, I usually bind the MFD buttons to common actions in the plane.

There’s also some other options. In DCS you can also assign a button (i.e. on your HOTAS) to left-click/right-click. This allows you to simply look at the thing you want to manipulate and press that button, basically hands-free. There’s some other things out there that can help with control of the plane in VR, such as pointCTRL, tobii eye or capto-gloves, but I don’t know anyone who has those and how good they are.

@jack72

Ease of compatibility to the games listed above. Is it just plug and play, - What level of tweeking is needed for the VR set to work with my computer / games. (I am not great in computer speak setting things up)

In my experience, getting the thing itself to work is quite some work. You need to place some sensors in your room usually, help it calibrate and stuff. You’ll need to follow some instructions and its going to take some time but you don’t need to be super computer tech savvy to get it done. Some things like the PDI setup is going to take some trialling and error until you get it set up so it works for you perfectly. In games itself, it is usally quite easy. In DCS you just have to go to VR tab of settings and enable it. That is all it takes, you’ll be taken to the DCS virtual hangar sitting next to a Su-27 (that thing is BIIIIG! in VR) with the main menu being projected in the air in front of you.