Virtual Reality - Part 1

The future of flight simulation

Having started my flight simulation hobby back in the early 1980s on the venerable Commodore 64 computer, I’ve had the good fortune to witness the parallel evolution of hardware and software over the past 35 years. I was there for 300 baud modems, the first 3D graphics accelerator cards, the first flight simulator joysticks and all of the newest processors that trickled onto the market at predictable time intervals. I was there when online multiplayer over the phone started, witnessed the explosion of the internet and the replacement of massive tube monitors to lightweight LCDs. It has been an awesome journey along the technology timeline, with new hardware affecting flight simulations to varying degrees. In late 2016, after hearing the praises sung by some close friends in the flight sim community about virtual reality headsets, I took the leap into this new hardware realm and can definitively state that I feel this is the biggest advance into the future of hardware that I’ve seen in all my decades of flight simulation.

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