Seeing the real world inside a virtual one

On this episode of The Vergecast, the fourth and final installment of our series on the five senses of video games, we asked Polygon’s Charlie Hall to help us make sense of the current state of the art in flight simulation. Hall, who once spent more than four months in VR mapping the edge of the Milky Way galaxy in Elite: Dangerous, has more experience in a virtual cockpit than most. We wanted to know how the pros set up their simulators to get the most realistic experience and why it’s so complicated to make a virtual world look like the real one. Further reading: It’s time to build the cockpit of your dreams Microsoft Flight Simulator’s most-needed feature is co-op My first kill as a Star Citizen If Microsoft Flight Simulator has you craving air combat, try this flight sim next Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it it wasn't.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 0:33David Pierce?

  Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Bing Maps API. I'm your friend David Pierce and this is the fourth and final episode in our series all about the five senses of gaming, brought to you by Visible Wireless. We've done sound, we've done touch, we've done taste and smell together in one episode. That was last week's episode and if you haven't listened, it is one of the most unhinged Vergecast topics in a while. Super fun. Go find it. Today for our last episode in the series, our producer Liam James is here to tell us about vision. Liam, welcome to the show.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Hello, hello.

• 1:06David Pierce?

  I'm so excited we get to like have you on instead of just you yelling at us for taking too long to go to ad break. This is great news.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Yep, you finally convinced me to come on the show.

• 1:18David Pierce?

  So we gave you, I what I would assume is like the easiest topic in video gaming, which is sight. How has this experience been for you?

• 1:28Speaker 03

  I definitely thought I lucked out when I drew the long straw and got vision. And then quickly realized, wow, there's just so many roads I could take with this mission.

• 1:38David Pierce?

  I do remember you got really excited about TVs at one point. You were like all up about wanting to do a whole thing about televisions.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  I did. I am a huge display nerd. I find new tandem OLED screens to just be, to me, that's my sports. But David wouldn't let me do that, listener. Lucky for you.

• 1:57David Pierce?

  Nothing makes great audio like deep dives into display technology. That's kind of how I feel.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Agree to disagree. Agree to disagree. But yeah, the the journey took me back to my childhood, which was a very big surprise. And it turns out the thing that was the the most advanced, most spectacular visual experience you could have back when I was a kid is arguably still the same thing, and that's flight simulators. Yeah, back when I was a kid, flight simulator was the thing I wanted to try but couldn't, didn't have the computing power. So I just kind of admired it from afar and stopped paying attention to it once I got a little older. But fast forward to this episode and and looking around at what the visual landscape is in gaming, and I was blown away by what you can recreate

• 2:44Speaker 03

  in a flight simulator today. It's just astonishing. So I reached out to Polygon. I said, who's the flight sim person that I should be speaking to about this? And of course, they partnered me up with Charlie Hall, who I had a great conversation with about all this. But what I really wanted to find out was, in 2024, what is the best way to experience a flight simulator? Is it creating a wall of monitors? Is it strapping a VR headset on? Is it something in between? And the answer was not as obvious as I thought it would be. And Charlie really helped me understand what is a gimmick? And what is actually useful when you're trying to fly a virtual airplane?

• 3:21David Pierce?

  Okay, so before we get into it, just give me the like, super high level, what is it about flight simulator that is so sort of uniquely visual? Like, when I think of really visual games, you think about the sort of big, huge, open world, like No Man's Sky kind of games with like, beautiful graphics, and it's always in space, and everything is happening. Flight simulator seems otherwise like it's just like a bunch of buttons and you're in a cockpit. Like, what is it about flight simulator that felt so like specifically visual to you?

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Absolutely. The more fantasy-like games, in fact, even flight simulators that take place in space, are actually a lot easier for us to create because they're not based on something in real life that we can compare it to. Whereas in a flight simulator, like, for instance, Microsoft Flight Simulator, you've got models of real planes at real airports, you're actually flying a real-life recreation of planet Earth. You can literally fly all the way around the Earth, and if you were to look at a bird- Third's eye view of what you're seeing, it is one to one exact to satellite imagery that Microsoft has been building over many, many years.

• 4:28David Pierce?

  And if I'm not mistaken, there are a lot of people on the internet who like make it their job to find when that is wrong. And that like the stakes for screwing up the length of a runway at the airport in-flight simulator are actually like pretty high.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Very high. Yes. Everything from the hat switches to the airports to the airplane reflections on the outside, they try for the most accurate representation as you can get. And that's a lot harder than just creating some wacky looking spaceship that you'd see in a sci-fi movie.

• 4:59David Pierce?

  Got it. Fair enough. All right. Well, before we get into it, I should say, I haven't really been a flight simulator guy. And still I'm sitting here looking at my one measly 24 inch monitor. And I feel like this episode is about to cost me a tremendous amount of money. So with that as a warning to everybody, here's Liam and Charlie.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Charlie Hall, welcome to the Vergecast.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  Glad to be here.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  So I was lucky enough to be the producer chosen to do the vision episode for this gaming series that we've been running the last three Sundays. I couldn't help myself. I went back to being an eight-year-old kid with Packard Bell 46 computer, wanting to play video games. And the one I wanted to play the most, but couldn't actually run on my machine was Microsoft Flight Simulator.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes. The, the original like crisis for PC gaming, right? Does it run Flight Simulator?

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely. This was 1993 or 1994. And yeah, I just, I couldn't run Flight Simulator. And probably because of that, right? I wanted to play it so badly. Even though as a, you know, a third grade kid, I probably wouldn't have had the patience to sit through the pre-flight checks and actually get a plane off the ground in Flight Simulator. Didn't matter. I wanted to play that game because it just felt like something above and beyond a normal video game that you were flying in the air, but it also felt as close to real in 1993, 1994 graphics that you could get.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  So fast forward to today, a working adult with a salary, I could actually afford things like a gaming PC that could run Flight Simulator. I wanted to see what does Flight Simulator feel like and look like today? And quite a bit has changed in Flight Simulator in 30 years.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  It has.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  So maybe you could tell me a little bit about your experience with Flight Simulator. I know that Microsoft's been doing this for quite some time, but you know, there was some time in between where there was a dearth of flight simulators out there. What's the deal with Microsoft Flight Simulator?

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Well, much like you, I started playing Microsoft Flight Simulator in like the late 80s, early 90s. My dad actually worked at Bell Laboratories here in Northern Illinois. So he was able to bring home kind of his almost like company surplus, these fairly high-end switching terminals, basically. So I had a PC 6300 and 8086 board. And so I was playing an old version of Microsoft Flight Simulator at the Adlib Sound Card, right? So I had all the good stuff and I had my Gravis joystick there.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. You had a Gravis?

• 7:43Speaker 04

  I did, but it didn't have the twist rudder, right? So I had to do rudder with the keyboard. Anyway, and so I was able to take off and get up and going from Miggs Field, you know, back when there was a Miggs Field before Mayor Daley put a couple of eggses through it. And that really gave birth to this kind of lifelong gaming obsession with flight for me. I went deep on Flight Simulator. I got all the mods as they were going up for clearance at Toys R Us, right? I remember a science fair project that I did in eighth grade where I combined SimCity and Microsoft Flight Simulator and took the teacher on a tour of my SimCity that I had rebuilt in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Like, I was way into it as a kid.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  I just need to pause. I just need to pause for a moment to just tell the listener that the face I just had on was of complete awe. I mean, those were the games of my childhood, SimCity, Flight Simulator, that was so impressed, so impressed. Go on, I apologize for interrupting.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  But the way that Microsoft Flight Simulator was built back in the day was entirely by hand. The John Hancock Building, the Prudential Building, all of those famous buildings in the Chicago skyline were built by hand. So if you went too long on your approach and you hit the Adler Planetarium there at the end of Miggs Field, like, somebody put that there to impeach your progress in the game. But that is not necessarily the case in the modern version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. And we can certainly get to the modern version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, but for a while there, Microsoft kind of kept the heartbeat going, right? And then kind of some new competitors came into the

• 9:30Speaker 04

  space. X-Plane is another really popular platform that kind of grew up during the early 2000s and kind of came of age in kind of the 20 teens. But then there was this big surge of space flight simulation as well. This Chris Roberts, one of the co-creators of the Wing Commander franchise, kind of brought that back to life with Star Citizen, this massive, ongoing, decade-long project to recreate kind of the 90s dream of Wing Commander inside that game. And then, of course, Elite came into its own with a brand-new version called Elite Dangerous. And I've also had the experience in both of those.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  But after both of those products came to market, that's when Microsoft came back to it, basically, with this new vision for Microsoft Flight Simulator, which, while there are some things in the game that are kind of made and rendered and done by hand, the vast majority of the game is not done by hand. It's actually done with A very sophisticated, almost kind of photogrammetry, which we can discuss, too.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  So yeah, 2020 rolls around and Microsoft releases what, to a layman's eyes like mine, looks like photorealistic flight simulation. How did they pull that off? Have GPUs just gotten so good? What's, what is it that's making this look so pretty?

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Well, you gotta remember that Microsoft is, it's a very large company, Liam, and in addition to having in its portfolio, Microsoft Flight Simulator, which, I don't know if you're aware, is its oldest piece of published software. It's older even than Windows. In addition to owning Microsoft Flight Simulator, well, it also owns this little thing called Bing. And Bing is, in addition to being a very capable search engine, it is also a entire suite of mapping tools. So just like you can go to Google Maps, you can go to Bing Maps, and you can find your way around. But Bing has done something a little bit more aggressively than Google has,

• 11:42Speaker 04

  and that is capturing satellite information of the entire world. And so what Microsoft and its partners at a SoBo studio, a French studio that actually did a lot of the heavy lifting on Microsoft Flight Simulator, what they were able to do is take, I don't know if it's two or four or five petabytes of this satellite data that it's getting, that Microsoft owns effectively as part of Bing Maps, and then it bolted Microsoft Flight Simulator to this data. So when folks received Microsoft Flight Simulator in the mail or when they downloaded the client, they were really only downloading a tiny fraction of what they needed to run the game.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  You get the, the applet, you get the client, you get, you get it started up. And then it starts downloading, I think it was 120 gigabytes on launch day. It was one of the largest downloads on launch day that I'd ever received. And that was just the basic information. After you get that 120 gigabytes, then it starts streaming data directly from Bing. So if you go, like I went to Egypt to be parked, you know, 2,000 feet over the Great Pyramid at Giza. It's streaming in satellite data, photogrammetry information, all of this sophisticated information from Bing Maps and putting it directly on the screen in front of you using all kinds

• 13:12Speaker 04

  of technological wizardry. And it's literally applying that satellite data to other data sets that it's pulling in. It has topographical information that it literally skins the ground with satellite information. At launch, it was really weird. It looked kind of like there were rivers that were kind of crawling up the sides of mountains. They hadn't quite gotten it dialed in quite perfectly. As the game has progressed since 2020, that resolution, the, the difference between the topographical map and the satellite data has become even better. You're literally able to fly over the entire surface of the entire world and it looks like it does in Bing Maps.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  It, it actually looks better because it's, it's putting in trees, it's putting in houses, it's put, it's putting color on the roofs of these houses and it's doing all of it automatically without really any human intervention on that landscape. It's, it's really remarkable.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I have wondered a couple of times why the, the map companies, the Google Maps, the Apple Maps, Bing, don't just copy Flight Simulator because it is that much just prettier looking and more realistic than the 3D maps we get now.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  They go further than that though. They bring in real world air traffic. So you are flying in the sky next to other planes that are really in the real sky. They bring in real weather data from actual weather data in real time. You can actually bring in other players as well to act as like air traffic controllers so that they can control the airports that you're flying around. It's, it's an incredible multi-layered multiplayer simulation.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, simulation is truly the only word for it. Okay, I want to get into flight simulator peripherals, but first, we're going to take a quick break to listen to some ads.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Okay, we're back with Charlie Hall from Polygon. So, Microsoft has made us this unbelievably realistic world to fly within. But then, it's kind of up to the user at home to try to recreate a workspace that puts them, you know, immerses them in that flight world. And there are so many options you can go down, right? We could spend three hours today just talking about different control devices that you can use for things like rudder pedals, things like joysticks for different types of airplanes. But what I want to talk about, because this episode is about what we see when we're playing games, is what some of the gamers in this community have done

• 16:26Speaker 03

  to create visual experiences that are a little, you know, above and beyond what maybe a typical gamer has with a 16 by 9 computer screen in front of them. What are some of the things that you've heard about, or maybe you've even personally tried to kind of go beyond the 16 by 9 box that constrains a normal flight sim experience?

• 16:50Speaker 04

  The most easy and frankly, the most popular next step is to go with multiple monitors. Some folks will do two, but then you have that bezel kind of right in front of you there. So the kind of the standard is three monitors. And so there are companies that will make triple monitor arms with the intent being that you tell the program, be it Microsoft Flight Simulator, or X-Plane, or Star Citizen, whatever you're using, "I have three monitors." And then you kind of calibrate it in and you've got a view out the front of the canopy on your middle monitor to whatever degree works for you, a view out the left side of the canopy and the right side of the canopy.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  And at its most fundamental, this lets you do things like line up your approach when you're landing, when you're making that final turn. You can see the runway, you can time that turn appropriately without doing any crazy stuff with a hat switch or your keyboard. So that is kind of the most typical adaptation. The next step up from there is actually my preferred way to fly. And that's with something called the Track IR or Track Infrared. So if you remember the Wii, right? The dearly departed Nintendo Wii. It had that remote control and there was infrared emitter on the front of the remote control. Then you'd put that bar up on the top of your TV and the bar would track where you're pointing the Wii mode, right? Sure.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  Track IR works basically the same way. You get three little IR emitters. You clip those to your headset or you clip it to your hat. You just make sure it's on your head. And then there is a receiving panel that you put on the top of your middle monitor. And it just kind of sits there. And yeah, as you move your head, the panel on your monitor can see how those three points of light move in space and it interprets that. As head movement inside the game. So when I'm using my track IR, I can just look ever so slightly to my left. In the calibration of the track IR, it will accelerate my head movement inside the game. So even though I'm still looking at my middle monitor on the

• 19:00Speaker 04

  screen, what I'll be seeing is fully behind me.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Very cool.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  And so you can calibrate this to meet your needs for a number of different games. I use it also for Arma 3. I used to use it for DayZ and it gave me a neck, which is not something that you get in most first person shooters. Tremendously helpful when you're looking down a gun site to be able to look to the left, look to the right without taking that gun off your shoulder. But in a flight simulator, it's just situational awareness. And it's increasingly important when you're doing any type of combat flying. So when I'm playing in Elite Dangerous, it's very easy to lose my quarry, to lose my bogey, lose the thing that I'm trying to shoot at. And I can look around really with my actual

• 19:43Speaker 04

  head and the view changes on my screen and it is delightful. An alternative solution to that, and it's something that I've had less success with, it's eye tracking technology. A company called Tobii does that, or Tobii, I don't know how to pronounce that company correctly, but it's more in line with the, the form factor of the old Wii. It kind of sits on the bottom or the top of your monitor and it literally looks at your eyes. And as you move your eyes, it changes the view for you.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  So it seems like Charlie, peripheral vision in flight is essential, right?

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  So, you know, casual gamer like myself, I can't help wondering, why not just throw a VR headset on your, on your face? Have you tried that at all?

• 20:26Speaker 04

  I have, I have actually. In Elite Dangerous, I traveled from the bubble, which is the area right around the Sol system, in the unfashionable western spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy. And I went all the way across 65,000 plus light years to Beagle Point, one of the furthest reaches in that game. And I spent four months nightly making that trip. And I did it all in virtual reality with kind of, I think it was a launch Oculus, if I remember correctly.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  So you have a lot of experience in VR and I would imagine a very strong neck.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it was, it was daunting, man. Probably like two to four hours per week night. Yeah, it was a lot of travel. I was doing probably like 80 jumps a night to try and get where I was going. And anybody who's played Elite knows that that's a lot of, a lot of, a lot of pushing the throttle back and forth. But I've also done it in Microsoft Flight Simulator. I've done it in, I've tried to do it in Star Citizen, but I've done it in a few other flight simulators as well.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, I mean, as an apartment dweller, I'm looking around at my space thinking, hmm, two or three screens, that's, that'd be hard to fit on my desk, but a VR headset seems, at least at first thought, to be the perfect solution for this. If I move my head up or down, left or right, it's, it's gonna show me what I would be looking at in a cockpit. But there have to be some downsides of it and the cost. Tell me about your, that four months in VR, what was it like?

• 21:54Speaker 04

  I mean, Elite Dangerous is a real pleasure in VR, and there's a reason for that. You're often not looking at it very much. It's, it's space, Liam. There's a planet.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  It's very far away. Looks like a star. There's a couple thousand of those. And, and that's it for the majority of your trip. Now, you get closer to a single celestial body. It's, it's very easy for that circa 2014 client to get the, the visuals right as you're coming closer to it. So rarely do I have issues with frame rate in Elite Dangerous. Microsoft Flight Simulator is real hard, though, and we're talking about, I think I had an I7 or an I9, 32 gigs of RAM, a 2060 card I was working with, and Microsoft Flight Simulator was still very challenging, frame rate wise. And when you are flying,

• 22:47Speaker 04

  you do not want to have a delay in your frame rates. You need to know where that airplane is relative to air traffic around you, relative to the ground, relative to the runway, at all times. So aside from just, you know, the nausea that can be induced by the frames locking up or skipping, not having that situational awareness is, is gonna end your playthrough very quickly. But the other big issue that I had on my trip to Beagle Point in Elite Dangerous was... Well, I couldn't see the keyboard and Elite Dangerous is unique. They actually model the SciTech X52 joystick into the game. And so it was a partnership between SciTech,

• 23:30Speaker 04

  recently purchased by Lodge Tech, and Frontier Developments to put their product in the game. So I looked down in real life at the SciTech X52, same controller I'm using in the game, but it doesn't move the same way all the time because I have my bindings set differently than the game is expecting me to have my binding set. So when I use the rudder, it shows my hand twisting, but no, my feet are moving because I have rudder pedals. So that's not one to one. But there's a lot of buttons in the cockpit and I need this keyboard in front of me in order to hit those buttons. And so that required a lot of remapping of the controller. I was able to remap what I needed to do all those light speed jumps,

• 24:11Speaker 04

  to do all the landing, to do all the maneuvering, to the buttons on my Warthog throttle and the buttons on my Warthog. I think it's an F16 stick that I swapped out for the traditional Warthog stick. But I was able to do everything I needed to do using the buttons on the joystick, including reset the center of my VR. But I couldn't shut down the game. I couldn't pause the game for that. I had to take off the helmet. I had to look down at my keyboard and it takes you out of the experience a little bit, but mostly it's a performance issue. Like if the frames are not where you need them to be, it's a very uncomfortable experience and it's not productive, frankly. It's better, I feel, to have the higher

• 24:55Speaker 04

  frame rate, to have it on a monitor in front of you. And I prefer to use Track IR over VR because of that.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Well, it seems like the community agrees with you. I've watched many, many hours of people excitedly trying out headsets from the MetaQuest 3, the Valve Index, of course, the HTC Vive. And one in particular stood out to me that a lot of Flight Sim enthusiasts were excited about last year, which was the Pimax Crystal. And it seems like a very Very similar story to what we're seeing with even the Apple Vision Pro, the kind of consumer focused version of one of these VR headsets. And that, you know, there's, there's a huge amount of anticipation and excitement. And then, of course, you get the thing and you try it on and you, you see all the edge cases and issues with it.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  And you've now have this very expensive device that you can strap to your head, but you don't want to anymore. It seems like from what I'm gathering from the Flight Sim YouTube community is that a lot of people have tried these, these VR headsets and gone back to that three monitor setup that you're talking about because in the end, that just still provides a better experience. Is that, would you agree with that?

• 26:10Speaker 04

  I would agree with that. It's absolutely been my experience. It's been my experience in, you know, high end Flight Sim YouTubers that I follow. The folks like the Grim Reapers, the majority of their team, I think, does the, the one or two or three monitor setup. And so do the ground training centers for the F-35 and the F-22. Like when you look at the military training regime for those latest generation fighters, you know, it's a tactile experience for them. They need to know that the buttons in the cockpit are where the buttons are going to be in the actual cockpit. And that's the majority, I think, of what they're training to.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  I need to hit this switch without even looking at it. That's the work. And they should already know how to fly the airplane by that point. But yeah, technologically, it seems to be a better experience just working with screens.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  Okay, we're going to take another quick break. Then we'll get into whether VR will ever be the future of flight simulators. We'll be right back.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard, Confessions.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Okay, we're back. Charlie, you know, I have to tell you, Chris Grant, your colleague at Polygon, has been on the Vergecast before to talk about VR. And he has this very strongly held opinion that games in VR should really be limited to like 25 minutes. And when I think of Microsoft Flight Simulator, 25 minutes is barely enough to get you through the pre-flight checklist.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  What do you think? Is Chris just sensitive to VR headsets? Or is this something we really need to figure out how to solve before VR gaming beyond casual VR gaming becomes a thing?

• 28:21Speaker 04

  I've probably spent as much or more time in VR than just about anybody at Polygon, from first-person shooters to third-person platformers to flight simulators. And like, the drawbacks to the human physiology are real. I spent a lot of time, for instance, reviewing Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which was, you know, the reimagining of EA's classic first-person shooter, but for the Oculus Rift. And review situations can be stressful. And so I had to spend about six, eight hours reviewing this game under a time crunch for embargo. And Liam, I was laid out for the rest of the week.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Oh, I bet.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  It had a deep, deeply bad thing happen to my inner ear and all of the things that kept me upright.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  It was just this low-level nausea that I was stuck with for like, the better part of three days. So I don't enjoy first-person shooter games. I don't enjoy Minecraft in VR. I was there at that press event as well for Minecraft VR, and it was not a pleasurable experience. But flight simulators, they work for me. And I'll tell you why. Elite in particular has a permanent horizon line in front of you. It is this transparent dashboard piece that sits on the screen in front of you. And it's a similar thing with a flight simulator. You've got that top of the cockpit dashboard right there in front of you. And it eases a lot of that motion sickness for me. And that may not be true of everybody.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  But actually having it on your head for more than an hour or two does get to be taxing. I would come out of my office after my trip to Beagle Point and the kids would make fun of me because I'd have this trench down my bushy hair on the top of my head. I'd have goggle marks on my face. The tip of my nose would be red because I'm a six and a half foot tall human and all of me doesn't quite fit inside of most VR helmets because of that. But also, especially with something like, I've had a lot of experience with the HTC Vive, very heavy on the front. When you're using the wireless set, there's a battery that you have to wear on your waist to get truly untethered access to that platform.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  And it's just a lot of stuff that weighs you down. And yeah, there's some fatigue on your neck. So, I don't know. It's, some headsets are better than others, in my opinion, but I mean, it's, it's certainly nothing like wearing a military style helmet for a long period of time. That is a weight on your head, but it's, it's not the most comfortable thing either. Microsoft Flight Simulator does something really clever in this regard. You can actually accelerate your flight. Like you do the takeoff part, you can do the landing part and you just hit a couple of buttons and it takes that whole middle part and just compresses it down to a couple of seconds. So you're, you're doing the most active, the most engaging parts of the flight during your time in VR and you don't have to, you know, do the overland autopilot section for four hours to get to LA.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  That's very cool. I didn't know they, they had that feature. That's nice. So Charlie, as Microsoft continues to push the boundaries of what's possible with Flight Simulator, making it feel more and more realistic to what you'd experience in a real cockpit, do you think that VR may come back into the fold? Or do you think that the visual experience is best represented by a wall of monitors kind of making you feel like you're inside a cockpit?

• 31:51Speaker 04

  I am really excited about the mixed reality work that I'm seeing out of the Apple VR in particular. And here's why. When Microsoft set out to make Flight Simulator and Flight Simulator 2024, the latest addition of it, they worked very closely with aircraft manufacturers, with Boeing, with Airbus, with folks like Icon. And what they've done is they've actually baked into the game pre-flight checklists. And if you go down those pre-flight checklists, well, lo and behold, you can actually interact with all of the gauges and dials and buttons

• 32:32Speaker 04

  and switches in the aircraft. It is a hot dashboard in front of you. You need merely point your face down with your track IR, use your mouse to reach out and click those switches. But I look forward to a day where there's some kind of mixed reality in front of me, where I can see my hand or a vision of my hand, and I can reach that hand out, I can touch this virtual dashboard in front of me and change the altitude setting and switch to the other gas tank. And I can lower the landing gear really with my hands virtually, rather than using the keyboard. But I don't have a good expectation that

• 33:14Speaker 04

  that is going to happen anytime soon, because there are better, cheaper solutions like monitors and keyboards out there. I don't know that there is enough desire, enough of an audience really, to make that happen. But I can see how it could work. Does that make sense?

• 33:33Speaker 03

  That makes perfect sense. And honestly, mixed reality is probably the perfect technology. It's exciting to see some of the things we can do now with them. But what I'm really excited about is where, you know, of course, it's the joke that, right, VR is just a few years away. Or, you know, this is the year of Linux on the desktop. So many of those in the technology world. But it really does feel like we've gotten to a point now where we can comfortably say mixed reality will eventually get to a point that can offer us some experiences that we just, we can't pull off right now.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. And just like they have the capacity to stream in new satellite data or new weather data, I'm confident that Asobo and Microsoft Have the capability to add that in there, too, because they've got those dashboards, those cockpits that really do have working switches, really do work like the real thing.

• 34:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's very exciting. My third grade self, just hoping and wishing for a computer to one day run FlightSim, has been reignited. I'm very excited about this future. So we'll have to have you back to try those new things when they finally come out.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  I can't wait. I will be there and ready to fly. Let's do it.

• 34:46David Pierce?

  Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Thank you, Liam. This was a blast.

• 34:51David Pierce?

  Thank you, Liam. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you to everybody who listens to this show. That is it for The Vergecast for today. I honestly believe I'm about to go buy a bunch of new monitors. I don't even really know that I'm a flight simulator guy. I've dabbled with it in the past. I also, at one point, got very excited about a Formula One simulator. That's a whole thing. But at some point in this episode, I just looked at my One monitor and I'm like, this isn't enough. It's time. Anyway, thank you, as always, for listening. This is the last episode in our Five Senses of Gaming series, but we will be back with more special content for you really soon. We have some more fun series coming up between now and the end of the year. It's gonna be great. As always, there is lots more to read on gaming and everything going on in tech at theverge.com. It's a website.

• 35:36David Pierce?

  We like it a bunch. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Por and Andrew Moreno. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Tuesday to talk about Microsoft PCs, the smart home, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.