The school bus-like Mi-8’s seat felt comfortable and cozy, while the Gazelle’s interior made me feel like my shoulders were being squeezed by the door and the rotor brake hung mere inches from my face.
The pilot’s body in DCS further adds to the sense of “being” there since you can very clearly see your “own” pilot body including your legs, arms and shoulders. While the Mi-8’s cockpit felt spacious (and I mean… HUGE!), the Gazelle’s interior is cramped and feels suffocating.
The sense of claustrophobia is also an interesting aspect of the Rift. One wrong move… and a potentially very real heart attack could follow. As I saw the leaves rush under my feet when flying to the “nap-of-the-earth”, my hand tightly gripping the collective felt shaky and tense. Dodging poles and buildings was fun and exciting, but flying at treetop level at 100 kts was a terrifying experience. Landing on building rooftops became much easier and felt more natural. I could instinctively judge my height much more accurately than before, allowing me better precision when doing sling load operations. The added sense of depth is what makes a true difference here. I gave the Huey, Mi-8 and Gazelle a whirl and flew a couple of hours over Las Vegas. Yes, the sense of immersion is THAT impressive. Keep in mind that at that point, I haven’t even fired up the engine yet. Despite this mild annoyance, for a second, I felt like I was stepping foot in an actual helicopter. The resolution in the CV1 is much better than previous development kits good, but not great yet. The big gauges were readable, but the smaller ones were not. No matter where I looked, I wasn’t sitting at my desk anymore: I was surrounded by metal sheets and rivets, and panels bristling with instrument gauges, caution lights, knobs and switches. Taking the Huey as an example, I immediately noticed the sun’s reflections on the windshield, the upper console almost grazing my head, the uncomfortable metal seat behind my back, the gunsight right in my face, and the spacious interior of main cabin. Once I started paying more attention to the cockpit, I was overwhelmed with all these small details I never really noticed before. The added perception of depth and bigger field of view provided by the Rift scales everything to more realistic proportions. When you look at a 2D flat screen, most aircraft look like they are roughly the same size. The first thing that struck me when I jumped into a helicopter’s cockpit was the sheer size of it. Basically, I tried as many different types of aircraft as possible in a variety of scenarios to see what the Rift brings to the table. My first “Rift” experience lasted for a couple of hours. This highlights how blurry the lines between reality and simulation have become with the age of virtual reality. The Rift plays tricks on your mind and you will realize that you may react in unpredictable ways. I will use the word “feel” an unbearable number of times but for a good reason: the VR experience is all about your senses being stimulated by what your body perceives. I won’t go into much detail on the straightforward installation setup and jump straight in-game and shoot my first impressions. The Oculus’ installation is short, simple and sweet basically plug-and-play. Most of you may already have heard of this virtual reality device. Now that we have a fleet of different aircraft at our disposal and that various new maps are being developed, one might wonder what the next step is. It is crazy to see how far DCS has come since the release of Black Shark in 2008.
Mudspike Contributor ‘Chuck Owl’ gives us his first experiences of using the Oculus Rift CV1 with DCS.
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