Earlier this year it was my birthday, and I considered a somewhat-pricey present: the Rift S virtual reality headset. My hesitation cycled through three questions: Could my Razer 15 handle it, would I use it for more than just for X-Plane, and, finally, would I really use it for X-Plane? While I waffled, it went out of stock globally, and remained out of stock for a few months.

Two weeks ago, the Rift S came back in stock briefly on the Oculus website. As my finger hovered over the buy button, the questions emerged. Fortunately, the fun side of my brain quickly subdued the thinking side by yelling, “You fool! While you’re waffling, someone else is buying the last headset.” So, I instantly clicked buy. Within two hours, the Rift S was out of stock once again. But I had mine. I almost giggled, as if I’d scoffed up the last Cabbage Patch Kid while a mob swarmed the toy aisle.

I’d experimented with X-Plane quasi-VR before using the iPhone app Ivry and a Google Cardboard headset. That setup gives three degrees of freedom tracking with a 3d image. That image hovers in front of your face, as if it were a miniature 3d tv, and, like 3d movies, you feel as though you are viewing a plane which has objects protruding from and into it. Your brain registers it as a 5” screen which has depth hovering a few inches in front of your face.

When I first put on the Rift S, its external cameras turned on and entered pass-through mode, showing me my desk overlaid with a 3d grid. Using the controller, I touched the floor, then traced a boundary for my play area. For a few seconds, my brain fizzled, wondering what I was seeing, because everything in my house was at 1:1 scale and exactly where it should be. So, you can imagine when the Oculus software overlaid the radial control panel in an arc where my actual keyboard was, it was there in my mind. When the WallE-style tutorial kicked in and enclosed me in a cluttered room with 90s video game consoles, the room replaced my physical room at the same scale. And this is perhaps the biggest difference with VR: scale. Things appear life-sized and encompass you. I had a moment where I turned around and saw the WallE room was indeed sealed up behind me. For my brain, I was now “in” the room. I felt like I’d stepped through the holodeck entrance, watched the entrance close and seamlessly fade into the scenery. I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face.

There are certain transformational technology leaps that you’ll always remember. The Atari logo appearing on your home tv’s screen when you first plugged in the 2600 wood-grained console. Whipping a bowling ball down an alley with a Wii controller and watching it hook and gutterball the same way it does when you throw a real bowling ball. Putting on a VR headset and tricking your brain that you’re inside the scene.

The first game I played with my entire family was Beat Saber. It’s a full-body experience with crouching, dodging, and slashing. I felt like a Jedi. The next game was Lone Echo, where you are weightless in a spaceship, grabbing and pushing off surfaces to navigate. Here the scale hit. The ship’s environments were huge. At one point, I came around a corner to collide with the other character who I didn’t realize was returning to the room. I nearly jumped out of my seat.

X-Plane took a fair amount of technical tweaking to get going. This is always true of X-Plane whether or not you’re using VR. Oculus has a feature called Asynchronous Space Warp which makes the head tracking perfectly smooth even if the scene is being rendered at lower frame rates. Scenes rendered anywhere from the low 20s to upper 40s for fps, but of course you could improve that by turning down details. Here’s the main things I noticed playing X-Plane in VR:

1. Scale - I cannot overstate what it’s like to see things full-sized surrounding you. You develop a certain mental model based on playing the game in 2D, and VR corrects it. I’d imagined cockpits as the size of my car’s dashboard, but nearly every one was smaller and more cramped. Looking outside the plane, wings were huge. I hadn’t realized just how big the prop is on an SR22, and the engines on my Piper Cheyenne were frighteningly large. When I flew over scenery, bridges were humongous.

2. Feeling movement - the first time I banked my plane into a standard left turn and looked over my left shoulder at the scenery, my stomach dropped out. I felt gravity shift and myself leaning. For fun, I followed that up with some stalls and spins. The sensations were crazy. Even when flying in a straight line I could feel the wind and tell you that it was pushing on the nose of the plane along a quartering angle. When you feel like you’re sitting in the place, you’re very in tune with how the plane is moving.

3. Resolution - the resolution is adequate for reading text. You can improve it, at the expense of fps, with supersampling. In 2d, I normally play on a 2k monitor. When you enlarge a 1080p image to the equivalent of a 55” monitor mounted a foot from your face, it’s going to look blocky. So, this is a downside compared to 2d.

4. Screen door effect - pixels do not seamlessly flow into other pixels on screens. There’s a little border around each. When magnified, the border shows up as a faint screen door effect. On the Rift S, it is present, but very mild. My brain tuned it out quickly.

5. Night scenes - I’m a bit spoiled by my iPhone X with an OLED screen, I remember how with my previous IPS screen iPhone, I could tell when it had turned on after a reboot when the black display suddenly turning dark gray. The Rift S is similar. Night scenes are okay, but it’s as if the contrast has been turned way down, with anything dark glowing as murky gray. There may be some more fiddling I can do to adjust this. I recall my 2k monitor also washed out night scenes until I got it set up correctly.

6. Hand controllers - the Rift S controllers are fantastic. Tracking is perfect, they have sensors to detect what your fingers are doing, and haptic feedback. X-Plane interactions are a bit wonky and have a learning curve. You expect you can press buttons with your extended finger or the controller tip, but both pass through objects. Instead, you squeeze the controller trigger and it fires a laser pointer. Depending on the target, you then may need to do a hand motion to move it. Dials, such as the heading bug, are intuitive and require you to rotate your wrist. Others pop up a gradient slider, which, depending on how the aircraft manufacturer coded it, is not always in the same orientation as the control (you may lift your hand up to slide a control forward). It’s considerably easier if you can reach the control and touch it with the controller. Using the laser pointer from a distance can be difficult, particularly with flip switches such as the battery or alternator. One of the odd quirks of 1:1 scale is that my play area is not the size of a Piper Arrow, so there are things I just can’t reach. Just about anything underneath the yoke is physically inside my real-life desk. For those, I’ve set up keyboard shortcuts. As an aside, I think the Rift S has the best controllers. The way they click when turning virtual knobs is very compelling, and grabbing a virtual pistol feels completely natural.

7. Motion sickness - I’ve had no motion sickness other than the intentional type (where I did several stalls and spins in a row and felt like I’d actually done them).

8. Field of view - Somewhat of a letdown. The FOV is 115 degrees, which is fairly standard for VR headsets. Much like looking through binoculars, your vision consists of two overlapping circles, surrounded by black. You do not see the edges of the rendered image; instead, you see the edges of the lens. Mentally you tune it out, but it’s a bit like viewing the world wearing a scuba mask. In games where you actually wear a mask or helmet, it blends well.

9. Realism - It’s hard to explain how much the airplanes feel like your own when they are 1:1 scale 3D objects. I had a moment sitting on my couch in the Piper Cheyenne where I looked over at the co-pilot seat, put my hand down, and touched the couch surface (which was at the same height as the Cheyenne seat). I put my controller on it and it sat there. Then I turned around and looked behind me. In real life, there is a wall. In VR, the passenger cabin extends back fifteen feet. My brain shorted out for a second. If my play area permitted, I could have stood up and walked around back there, greeting my virtual passengers.

10. Sound - comes 360 degrees from the VR headset’s headband. It’s pretty good - better than my laptop speakers - and gets loud enough that you’ll want to turn it down. Not nearly as rich as your own headphones, which you also have the option of using. There is also a decent built-in microphone. The only downside is that everyone in the room hears the speakers unless you use your own headphones.

11. Plugins - I only added three plugins to help with VR:

    OVR Settings - lets you adjust supersampling and space warp on the fly, seeing the impact on an FPS counter

Move VR - this works both in VR and normal X-Plane, allowing you to drag external windows into X-Plane. You can view Skyvector, for example, in X-Plane. YouTube streamers often display their chats this way.

VR Tools - lets you easily edit your starting location in the cockpit and add new teleport spots, such as the co-pilot’s or passenger’s seats.

Not a plugin, but I downloaded Oculus Mirror, which creates a normal landscape image based on what your headset sees. Useful for recording/streaming so you don’t end up with the portrait-mode SteamVR image.

So, the verdict. Sometimes I’ll fly in VR, and sometimes in 2D. It depends on the type of flight. Hand-flying a GA aircraft through touch-and-goes is exponentially more awesome in VR. A long flight on autopilot where you want to take in all of the high-res scenery is better in 2D. As for other games besides X-Plane: they’re a blast! In a way, I sometimes prefer launching a game I purchased from the Oculus store, like Beat Saber, because it just works (compared to X-Plane, which requires tinkering). Games like Beat Saber and Lone Echo really only can be played in VR. Even Google Earth VR is a monumentally different experience in VR compared to what someone sees mirrored on the 2D screen (and it is an experience that will leave you grinning, as if you’re a guy in a Godzilla suit plodding through a scale model of a city).

I’m delighted with my purchase, and don’t know why I waffled for so long.