

The screens in my cockpit were mostly alien - the two dozen or so dials and buttons were hidden by the void, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to disable my parking brake. Do planes not have headlights? I’d genuinely never thought about it.Īll of a sudden, I was tossed right into the deep end. flight out of Manchester in the middle of winter meant my short maiden voyage was to be an expedition in total darkness. Rather than flying in pitch-perfect conditions, a 6 p.m. That ended up being the least of my problems.Īfter a daunting trip up in the air with a co-pilot protecting me from certain doom, I made the ultimately premature decision to head into the skies on my own. Madness, I know, but when you’re trying out a groundbreaking VR experience, you want to get right into it, not be tossed onto a runway without any knowledge of how to take off. Against my usual judgment, I elected to make my first-ever Microsoft Flight Simulator experience a tutorial in controls. Once the game was magically projected into my eyeballs - which is a visual feast, I might add - I grabbed a cheap Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas X throttle-and-stick controller from the PlayStation 3. While the Oculus Quest 2 seems like the most user-friendly option on the market, the situation displays how complicated even the most basic version of the tech becomes when paired with a game as ambitious as this. I could just compare it to a pilot thoroughly checking their instruments before they take the responsibility of ferrying a few hundred precious lives 5,280 feet in the air, but as life has taught me, I’m just not that patient - and my task is not as vital. I’ll never actually know what eventually got my game to work, so now I live in fear that any attempt to dive back in will require a 20-minute troubleshooting session. Thankfully, slivers of progress (i.e., different error codes) mean the game is at least acknowledging my efforts - whatever they were - so I kept at it.

I’m used to fiddling with games like Euro Truck Simulator 2 in VR mode, so I was expecting the same problems here. Virtual Desktop spits out better visual clarity compared to the USB method, making it the cheapest wireless headset by far.Įven with that ease of use, a fair amount of troubleshooting is required. For the most part, a USB cable is all you need for the Oculus Quest to retain its position as the best budget VR headset out there.
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While the vast majority of PC VR headsets are simple plug-and-play affairs, the same cann’t be said for my Oculus Quest 2. But Christmas came early for immersion lovers as the promised addition arrived just three days before the big day (maybe Santa even used it to optimize his COVID-dodging route).

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 was a massive launch title last year, but it came without the VR support that seemed like such a natural fit for the return of the long-running franchise. I wasn’t expecting to make it off the ground, and while I did, the experience gave me a crash course in how VR both helps and hinders the experience in a way only emerging tech can. I instead opted for a blissfully uneconomical eight-minute cruise from my hometown of Manchester to the neighboring city of Liverpool to the west. Fitbit Versa 3įor many, their first trip up in the skies would be the ideal route to retread for a Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 maiden voyage. We’ve compiled 34 virtual reality companies that are making the VR dream a reality. “Why the optimism? It’s not just because VR can create the coolest video games we’ve ever seen it promises to upend every industry you can name.” “The largest companies in the world have invested billions of dollars in VR - and they did that well before a single device had been officially sold in stores,” Wired correspondent Peter Rubin wrote in his 2018 book Future Presence: How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life. Sure, it’s still widely considered a gamer technology, and a niche one at that, but it’s also proven a valuable tool in e-commerce, retail, medical training, employee development, technology and non-gaming entertainment.

The global VR and AR market is expected to reach $454 billion by 2030, along with the estimated creation of 23 million VR-related jobs. Even though an envisioned future of ubiquitous headsets and haptic gloves failed to materialize, VR has nonetheless made some great strides and found a home in a variety of industries.
