I tried Ultrawings yesterday, and I must say I was impressed!
Yes, kind of minecraft terrain look-a-like, but great FPS. And I must say they have some nifty water graphics.
Using the touch controllers was easier and better than I thought it would be.
I quickly ran into the no. 1 problem with moving around in a VR world. There was something not so virtual obstructing my hands. Had to move my joystick and throttle out of the way to be able to reach the virtual controls of the cockpit.
Once this was solved, everything worked pretty well. As @PaulRix says, interacting with the fuel valve was finicky. You have to “grab” it like you would scoop up a full hand of sand, to close your fingers around it. Trying to pinch it between the thumb and index finger doesn’t work.
The flightmodel isn’t bad. A bit sluggish, and very draggy, which is true of many ultralights. You need to keep the approach quite steep to make unpowered landings.
There is some gyro physics in there as the nose yaws some at power changes.
Rudder is controlled by the left touch controller joystick. I wish they made it possible to use real controllers instead of touch controllers, but it works. And as I said earlier, better than I thought it would. Grabbing the stick with your touch controller feels quite intuitive.
I love the FBO user interface. A laptop where you accept missions. Move a few post-it notes on a board to change settings, and then grab your helmet an put it on your noggin’. Very cool!
Well worth the money, IMO. Worth to buy the controllers for Ultrawings! I don’t know? But the Touch Controllers may see some use in DCS as well, and that is a reason to get them. And their implementation in Ultrawings gave me hopes for DCS. Interacting with a VR cockpit is more intuitive than I thought it would be. Did I mention that already? 
Been googling a bit to look at 2010 projections(the year after Avatar) for 3D tv’s and most of the articles read much like the projections for VR, and we all know how big of a success the 3D TV is!
Well, I’m going to enjoy the flop that VR is going to be while it withers on the vine. You flat earthers don’t need depth perception anyway…
I was smart enough to skip the ‘Buy a 3D TV to play sims better fad’. Did you get burnt or could not afford it? 
To my recollection, Avatar in 3D was a bit of a surprise. It blew me away in the cinema, but I didn’t see a future for 3D TV’s at the time and I have no real interest in buying one even now.
VR is a different animal, at least when it comes to gaming. It is something that has been on the horizon since the late 1980’s/early 1990’s. I think it will be a niche market for some time to come, but I don’t see it going away.
We also ended up with faster consumer LED panels out of that 3D cul-de-sac too (helpful for VR, ironically), in that 240 Hz got driven by that need and most new TV’s still have it. It’s like is 1080p here to stay, in that more people buy it today than 4k still?
Or another example is non-hybrid electric cars, in that fewer people buy them than hybrids and they are showing a similar adoption curve to 3D TV’s, so it’s game over for Elon? That feels a bold call.
I feel VR/AR in some form is inevitable, and if it’s not this flop then it’ll come around again. The feeling of immersion and ‘VR Presence’ in gaming is an order of magnitude more impressive than watching ‘Dances with 6ft Smurfs’ at home in 3D with funny glasses on.
My point was is that the whole 3D thing got shoehorned onto all TV’s, but nobody got the glasses or content to play on it so it petered out as a method to consume media. The faster LED panels were not a result of the 3D hype though, that is a natural development of using LED’s as a display method compared to the LCD/Plasma tech that we started out with.
Electric cars are a different market, with a different public. Musk aimed at making it a high-class vehicle, to then lower production costs for cheaper vehicles. He has a plan, that is feasible and realistic.
For VR, hardware costs simply cannot fall as much as they can for electric cars. It would require some massive change, which I simply do not see happening anytime soon. Perhaps in a decade or so we will have the tech capable of that.
VR/AR is probably inevitable. But this round? It’s still very shaky and certainly not a run race.
I dunno. A decade is a looooong time in tech. I think mainstream VR is way closer than that. Like one generation away.
The speed of light and heat dispensation is currently a rather annoying and limiting factor in electronic design. That’s why the last few generations of cell phones only has made very small steps forward. Nothing special or interesting happening there.
The problem with increasing speed, and why we are currently limited in that regard is largely noise. The Amp Hour did a very interesting interview with pretty much the person that wrote the book on noise control about that.
So no, currently it’s not a run race yet in that regard either.
Does VR actually cost that much…? My Oculus CV1 cost less than the last gaming LCD screen I bought. And IMO, VR beats 2D LCD screens any day. And that’s todays tech. Imagine tomorrow, with higher res wireless VR headsets. Never mind us simmers! Who wouldn’t want to be immersed in a huge 70" screen projected in a pair of chunky glasses, when they are gaming?
The 3D TV reference is funny. I hated it! Didn’t want a 3D TV. Tried to buy one without 3D, but failed. Went to the store and sure, they did have 2D only TVs, but they actually cost more than the 3D counterparts. 2D were suddenly considered ‘special interest’.
And then Top Gun was released in 3D…
Can’t say I use the 3D glasses very often.
It’s the total cost of ownership that is very high, easily double the price of the unit self incase of the Oculus
Well, only if you are not already a gamer with a decent gaming rig. It cost me a lot because I had to completely upgrade my system from a 2012 gaming laptop. HBD btw!
Hmm. That’s a really odd thing to say, but I think you might just be fed up with a lot of the VR talk here, so fair enough.
I agree, the cost isn’t that high. For PC’s is about the same as a decent HOTAS and rudders, and probably less than a good monitor (as in, not a crappy monitor you can get that looks big but is just poor quality).
For the non gaming PC market, the Gear VR and Sony PS VR are quite affordable.
Why do you think Facebook, Valve, Google, Sony, Microsoft and Apple have no feasible VR plan but Elon alone does? Disrupting the car market seems harder than something like gaming, but that’s different? Just because the first units are hard to purchase on the low-end just means we’re in a similar set-up to how Tesla is. Sort of comparable approaches actually (in that if you can’t afford a Rift you might not have a Model S either)?
As for tech changes, there is inside-out tracking, fovaeted rendering, huge jumps each generation on GPU dies, common standards for license-free lighthouse tracking tech, dedicated VR specific panels in gen 2 (not reused phone panels) and lots and lots of other things. It could be the case you aren’t that interested in VR that you might just not really know about them? Anyway, I get the impression you might have made your mind up, so time to step away and we can leave this topic for general VR news. 
I fracking love VR. It’s the most revolutionary enhancement to computer simulations ever IMO. If there are other games that work well in VR then fine. Icing on the cake. But nothing has completely immersed me in a flying or driving sim ever like VR does. The technology is a game changer and I’m in for the long haul.
That’s what I’m thinking as well… I’m running VR on the same PC i used the 3440x1440 curved 34" display, that cost me more than the Rift.
Of course you need a gaming PC, and in some cases this means upgrading. But that’s true if you want to go 4K gaming as well.
That’s not what most people have, you guys already spend an exorbitant amount of money on equipment.
I don’t think gaming/simming as a hobby is any more expensive than other passtimes that people get into.
I know I have spent far more on astronomy equipment over the years.
Learning to fly as a hobby is a far bigger investment that requires a constant flow of cash just to stay current and proficient. A few years ago my wife bought a nice Kayak and the gear to go with it and that, all together cost about as much as my PC and Rift.
Buy a decent road bike for Triathlon and you can easily say goodbye to similar sums of money (actually more).
So, I guess it is all relative.
If I went to a boating forum and told them that they spent exhorbitant amount of money for new toys on their hobby I’d get called a troll, or at least that it really wasn’t that much money in the big scheme of things for them. Same with motorbikes, RV’s, drones, AV, fishing, actually thinking about, practically anywhere probably wouldn’t appreciate it; and they all spend far more than we do.
EDIT: sniped by Paul, but yeah same answer.
I spent $700 to be an early adopter 1080 card owner - so that’s about in line with what I would expect to pay as an early VR adopter. I spent around $500 for a HOTAS a few years back too.
But yeah, computers/software are my predominant hobby. I do some fishing, biking, and kayaking, but without a doubt computers and the simming hobby has been the lion’s share of my “hobby” budget. I’m sure glad I don’t have a sailing hobby anymore. And a flying hobby seems so far out of the realm of possibility at this point, that I’m glad I have my relatively cheap PC/gaming hobby for now.
Developers (and advertisers) are sure finding unique ways to capitalize on early VR…