VR Flight Simulator

February 27, 2025

A long time ago, my friend and I built a VR flight simulator. It was college and I find the story for this project nostalgic and endearing, but I will save it for another post. Because I hate reading my own writing -- especially when I haven't taken the time to meticulously edit -- this post will just present a brief introduction to the project, and a cool video of it in work.

The Problem:

Purely VR flight simulators didn't really exist. There were realistic flight simulators, and there were VR games with purely VR interactions, but combining the two hadn't really been done.

The initial idea was to create a pure VR flight simulator which could be used to assist with Pilot School training across several different aircraft models. The result was an attempt at creating the most realistic virtual flight simulator experience.

The Project:

We used Unity to handle all the VR interactions. Heavily leveraging VR toolkit and the newly released Oculus Rift CV1 SDK, we modeled the basic yoke and throttle controls as a series of joints and springs.

Instead of using some crappy Unity physics engine to handle the aerodynamic characteristics of our virtual plane, we wrote a script which provided state variables of the aircraft in X-Plane.

With the aircraft state variables passed from X-Plane to Unity, and the yoke and throttle control variables sent from Unity to X-Plane, we had a working simulator. There were many many challenges along the way, but here's a video of me taking our virtual plane up for a spin.