> VR is in my opinion absolutely groundbreaking in flight simulation.
So far I've held off on buying any VR-related non-sense because I have yet to find something that it would improve the experience of enough to warrant spending money on. It sounds like this might be getting me closer?
[0] I've written at length about this in the past, but he owned his company and sold to manufacturing plants. Many were out-of-state, so the plane allowed him to get to a few appointments and back home without a hotel stay -- or ... "gave him an excuse to own a plane". You pick :)
Admittedly it can take some tweaking to get the response curves calibrated to what feels natural, and it never feels as natural as simply looking around (but I'd argue putting on a headset comes with ergonomic issues of its own).
The 3D vision (a horizon never looks the same on a screen), full 6DOF tracking (you can look over your shoulder, bend down etc), motion controllers with which you can turn buttons.. It feels so real.
Even the way you look out the window to see if it's time for the turn to base, it just looks like how it looks when you do it in a real airplane. Seeing it on a flat screen is really not the same.
The VR works and works pretty well. The feeling of looking around in the cockpit is a nice improvement even over my old standby of TrackIR, which I used to use more frequently.
I will say that I think I might dust the TrackIR off and use it again at some point. VR is a little disorienting and uncomfortable for long time periods and just having head tracking with a monitor does get you part of the way there.
I do find it difficult to "touch" the controls in the cockpit, so if you want to actually learn the cockpit layout (rather than mapping a bunch of stuff to your keyboard and/or other input devices) you may want to pause the game while you select things.
The graphics in XP 11 can be somewhat improved with "Orthophoto scenery" and there is a lot of payware available too, but this is a deep rabbit hole with lots of sketchy downloads and mucking about. Even after doing this I don't think the visuals ever get close to competing with the MSFS "out of the box" experience.
What I like about the Q2 is that it's cheap and offers wifi capability so I can sit on the couch far from the PC. More relaxing that way.
Sometimes I use real controllers and I got a USB extender cable for that.
And why call out VR specifically? Well, VR is in my opinion absolutely groundbreaking in flight simulation. I've flown small planes too and I've never felt that a flightsim was able to provide the feeling of flying. Until VR that is. Now it's amazing.