VR spotting limits

[Giovanni_Giorgio]

Disclaimer: not a complaint in any way.

 

Speaking of spotting, what is the maximum range that you can spot airplanes, in favorable conditions in VR (e.g. against clear sky, no clouds and haze)? Is VR somehow limited in this regard as compared to flat monitors? In my Quest 2 I feel like there is no way for me to see beyond 10km, but my squadmates with large monitors can spot at ridiculously long distances.

[ITAF_Airone1989]

I can spot much more than 10 km, flying with flat screen teammates I saw no difference between us: sometime I see something that they don't see, sometime is viceversa.

 

The only disadvantage of the VR is the ID of the plane.

If you have troubles to spot, try to lower a little bit the antialiasing

[Giovanni_Giorgio]

2 minutes ago, ITAF_Airone1989 said:

I can spot much more than 10 km, flying with flat screen teammates I saw no difference between us: sometime I see something that they don't see, sometime is viceversa.

 

The only disadvantage of the VR is the ID of the plane.

If you have troubles to spot, try to lower a little bit the antialiasing

Interesting, what is your headset? I posted my in-game settings --- I don't play with AA at all. I use Quest 2 on an RTX 3080 laptop, which in most cases holds 90 fps at 1.2x resolution. At least I have those fps when spotting around.

 

 

[ITAF_Airone1989]

Reverb G1, try to see if your headset use some other thing that have a similar function to the aa

 

[Giovanni_Giorgio]

12 minutes ago, ITAF_Airone1989 said:

Reverb G1, try to see if your headset use some other thing that have a similar function to the aa

 

 

Great, thanks! Maybe some other Q2 users can help.

[chiliwili69]

1 hour ago, =TH=mincer said:

Maybe some other Q2 users can help

 

I don´t know about the Q2 (take into account that the Q2 needs to compress the image to be able to send it through the USB cable, so it is not a native resolution).

 

But in the past I was analyzing the spotting ability of the Rift (CV1) and the Pimax5K.

You can take a look of the through the lens images in this post: 

 

Those are old VR devices with lower resolution (the Pimax spread all those pixels along a wide FOV, so the pixel per angle are low). So spotting at 10Km was impossible.

 

With newer devices like G1, G2 and VivePro2 the pixel per angle has increased and they improved the spotting ability. I have not pictures to demonstrate how much it has improved.

[Giovanni_Giorgio]

Ok, after experimenting a bit, it seems that lowering the headset resolution to the point of undersampling (i.e. below native resolution) helps a lot with spotting. Just makes distant contacts blob more. Do you undersample your headset when flying competitively?

[SCG_Fenris_Wolf]

41 minutes ago, =TH=mincer said:

Ok, after experimenting a bit, it seems that lowering the headset resolution to the point of undersampling (i.e. below native resolution) helps a lot with spotting. Just makes distant contacts blob more. Do you undersample your headset when flying competitively?

This is correct.

 

IL-2 scales aircrafts at range depending on resolution, probably with the intention that the high-res headsets have no advantages in long range spotting over low-res.

 

But the result is that the scale is off in VR: Headsets need to use 1.5x of their native resolution for the distortion profiles. A good solution is to never go above 1.5x to 1.3x of your native display resolution. The lower the better.

 

 

 

P.S. I do not undersample the headset but have several teammates who are good at long range spotting.