Virtual Reality

 Lockdown has had strange effects, there can be no doubt.

In the relative affluence of the house of Sears, I'm pleased to be able to say that the idea of spending a few hundred quid on something special every now and then doesn't seem like a catastrophic dent on capital, really.  On the other hand, a few thousand quid for some sort of flying machine does seem like quite a lot. And have you seen the price of gyrocopters recently!  Gyrocopters used to be the last bastion of "I built it myself out of random bits of metal and pop rivets (and it looks like it!)" aviation,

single seat gyrocopter - may swap for kayak or similar

 but they have gone super-fancy in the last few years, and prices have gone fancy too - £50k for this 15 year-old Calidus two-seater, for example. 

two seat gyrocopter - may part ex. Lamborghini

Which is definitely not going to happen in the house of Sears.  

And by this inescapable logic, it came to pass that I shelled out four hundred of the aformentioned UK dollars on an Oculus Quest 2 Virtual Reality headset, as a kind of not-so-much mid-life as nearly-end-of-life substitute for proper aeronautical toys.

Which is really quite good.  It's completely stand-alone, unconnected to anything except by wifi, and the experience it provides can be quite enveloping - "immersive" is the VR buzzword, and rightly so.  At its best, the optical performance is exciting; viewed soberly, it is, undeniably, blurry round the edges.  Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible to play a convincing game of table tennis against your Quest-equipped next-door neighbour, in real time, via the internet.  Which, actually, is a kind of "wow"-moment for me.  Believable virtual table tennis in real time?  For £400? ( or even £300, if you can tolerate only 64GB of memory - nah, 256GB will be better in the long run, trust me) Yes, indeed.

Anyway, for me the whole point of VR is simulation, so I got the nearest thing in the Oculus store to a flight simulator, which is called Ultrawings.

Ultrawings is a flying game, where you take control of different aircraft and take on "tasks" to generate income with which to progress - you can buy a different plane, or an office in a new location with the proceeds of your efforts.  Each task has Bronze, Silver and Gold achievement levels, according to your best performance.  You can crash, or fail, without penalty.  You start with an ultralight:

ultralight - easy

which is very slow and easy to fly (but still has flaps!).  The next plane is (somewhat strangely) a rocket-powered glider.  

rocket powered glider - somewhat strange

It has similar performance to a glider (very low sink rate at 50kt, but slippery in a dive), but it has a rocket motor, which provides an arbitrary period of considerable thrust (above the centre of drag!).  You usually get a few goes on the rocket in each flight.  The flaps allow near-vertical approaches at 55kt.

Obviously you get a cockpit-based view, and the cockpits are nicely sharp and detailed, even if the scenery is - well - basic.  But it's always a lovely bright day in Ultrawings, with some puffy cumulus in a blue sky, which is nice.  Alas, in Ultrawings, the air never moves.  No wind, and no lift (or sink).  Shame. 

The game has "arcade" and "simulator" modes - naturally I only play in "simulator" mode, because I really wanted a proper flight simulator, and I'm a bit embarrassed to be just playing a video game, if the truth be told.  And it's fairly realistic in some ways, but as usual, the rudder is a bit wrong.  I only discovered recently that you can change the direction of flight using rudder alone, while the wings stay level.  Gah!  The only saving grace is that flying it this way does induce unpleasant motion sickness, whereas flying it properly doesn't.  

The third plane (an absolute bargain at $20k (virtual dollars)) is a sporty aerobatic jobby that flies quite well upside down, and can fly knife-edge, but oddly still doesn't have much of a climb rate.  It crashes with a disarming ease, not least because it's incredibly difficult to grab the throttle lever in flight, which is rather necessary for a successful landing.  You have to look down to see if your little virtual glove has actually closed around the throttle lever (which, bizarrely, is still no indication that you will be able to move the damned thing).  Obviously if you do this for too long,  you are pretty much doomed.  At the moment I'm experimenting with cutting the magneto to land instead, as if I were flying a Sopwith Camel.  Not having all that much success though.

another fatal accident about to happen

The rudder suffers quite a lot from being controlled by a switch - a little thumb-stick on the left hand controller - so you can't hold part rudder continuously.  You have to give it little kicks at a suitable rate, which is very unnatural.   And it's easy to accidentally select full rudder while you're trying to grab the throttle, and thus not looking where you're going, which is (of course) usually fatal.  

The last plane (I haven't got there yet) is the so-called Gee-racer, which is really quite silly.

a really silly aeroplane

It's heavily based on the 1932 Granville Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster:

a real, silly aeroplane

which was not only real, but a serious racer in its time, and won races, not least by having the biggest available engine (22 litres and about 800hp) in an airframe about the size of a car. It also briefly held the world land plane speed record, although Supermarine et al were going quite a bit faster with seaplanes.  According to Wikipedia, it wasn't that bad to fly, although there were, inevitably, a few accidents, not least because of its unusually high stall speed of about 100mph.  After a couple of rebuilds and various  changes, including the addition of bigger (302 US gallon!) fuel tanks, and fancy flaps which brought the landing speed down to a more manageable 65mph, the company went bust and sold the thing to a chap who fitted an auxiliary fuel tank in the tail.  The company's (ex-)chief engineer warned him never to fill it, or the plane would be so tail-heavy that it wouldn't fly, but our man thought it would be OK.  He crashed on take off and died.  

So, interesting to fly then. I'm hoping for savage torque-steer effects, at least.  Might have to settle for the obvious snag of zero visibility when landing, and a few little quirks the games people have put in, like the "you can't see the instruments when facing the sun" feature you get with the sport plane.  There are quite a few deliberate quirks in the game, and overall I think they do add something to the appeal of finding out how to succeed, even if they can be - er,  extremely frustrating!

Meanwhile, I bash on with the tasks.  I have to say, this game is not a training aid.  It positively encourages some flying habits I've previously been very much encouraged to avoid, like flying extremely close to, and under, and through things, and shooting at balloons which are hidden amongst houses, and squeaking it in against the clock to land like a 1920s airshow ace, rather than flying a sedate and well planned circuit.  In other words, it's flying just as you would want it to be.

The VR experience in general has some unexpected quirks. Ultrawings cleverly figures out where you are in your real-life room - sort of - so sometimes you can restart the game and find yourself under the table, or behind the chair, or just outside the office wall.  Once I managed to fly the aeroplane from just outside the cockpit for a while, although not being able to reach most of the controls is, er, somewhat limiting.  But everything is still rendered properly, wherever you find yourself.  Just don't try to lean on that all-too-convincing table tennis table!

Obviously, I'm now sold on the whole VR flying thing on the strength of Ultrawings alone, but I'm already looking ahead.  The next step would be to improve the VR performance (and increase the number of simulators and games you can choose from enormously) by running the software on a fast PC with a decent graphics card, and connecting it to the VR headset using a superfast wifi network.  Unfortunately, all those bits would need to be bought, and the cost would be not inconsiderable - definitely a few grand, I'm afraid.  But still not in the price bracket of a real aeroplane, even a microlight, let alone a fancy gyroplane.  And don't forget, the running costs would be extremely low!

We shall see.