I got the HP Reverb G2 in the $300 sale last month, and have been spending a lot of time with it since it arrived two weeks ago. I thought my impressions might be useful to some of those considering making the jump.

I"m assuming that you have mid-range, easily MSFS capable but not crazy hardware, that you already use TrackIR or similar, and that you have a decent monitor of at least 1440p and audio tuned to your liking.

Q: This is a long post, what's the TL;DR?

Yes, VR is awesome and more than a gimmick now, but it comes with major tradeoffs and you may not want to use it all or even most of the time, depending on your simming habits and style.

Q: What's so awesome about it?

If you already have head tracking, VR really only adds one thing to the sim, which is stereo 3D vision, mainly of your own plane. When you're close to things on the ground, there's a little 3D effect on them as well, but human binocular vision only goes out a few dozen meters and this is accurately reflected in VR, so once off the ground, your own aircraft - the interior and such parts of its exterior as you can see out the window - is the only thing you can see in 3D. (By that I mean binocular vision type 3D, of course; the entire world is rendered in 3D in MSFS, as you can see when you move your eyepoint or aircraft.)

Q: That's it? Is that really a game changer?

Oh yes, it is. Experiencing your aircraft in stereo 3D definitely makes it a whole new game. None of the 2D YouTube videos or anything you have seen can quite express how much more immersive it is to be in your cockpit in 3D. It really comes alive. As far as being a game changer, it is more of a game changer than when you first got TrackIR - but not entirely in a good way. TrackIR just made one thing about the sim much better, but with basically no downsides. It was now much easier and more intuitive to look around compared with the hat switch, but you were still playing the same game. VR comes with LOTS of downsides and is suited to a different way of experiencing and enjoying the simulator. It has the big benefit of seeing your cockpit in 3D, and I can't stress enough that this is very cool, but at the expense of making almost everything else about the sim noticeably worse. These trade-offs may not be for you, or may not be for all of your flying.

Q: What are these downsides?

First is the loss of visual quality. Almost no matter what kind of rig you run, you'll have to dial down your graphic settings to maintain good frame rates in VR. You may have to turn down your texture sizes and draw distances, give up volumetric clouds and lighting, turn off ambient occlusion, lighting and fog effects, and you'll get used to seeing antialiasing and other artifacts that you might have considered unacceptable on a screen. You may even have to turn off all AI air, land, and sea traffic, which can make the world a pretty quiet place. (I have kept my traffic settings at around 5% so the world isn't completely dead.) Even if you have a fast rig and don't dial down your settings so much, it's being delivered through a headset projector that is very inferior in resolution, color, and contrast to a decent screen. VR headsets have a sharp zone or "sweet spot" in the center, and the Reverb is known for having a relatively small one; outside of the area directly in front of your eye, you get a lot of blur and color fringing. I was warned about this but was still surprised at how much the visual quality fell off away from center.

Second, you lose a lot of field of view. The visual area in a VR headset is a roughly circular patch that takes up only about 98 degrees of your 190 degree (horizontal) field of view, so there is blackness above, below, and especially to either side of your viewing area where you are expecting to see stuff with your peripheral vision. The effect is not so much of being surrounded by a cool 3D world as looking through a peephole at a cool 3D world. This is one of the differences between really high-end VR headsets and consumer units like the Reverb, and I'm sure will be improved in future generations at the consumer price point.

Third, the VR headset will become yet another source of MSFS freezes and CTDs - just what you needed, right?

Fourth, cockpit interaction is more difficult. The gauges are harder to see and read, and you'll be switching among instrument views more than you used to in order to get a good look at them. Mouse control of the instruments is wonky which will result in irritating, and occasionally fatal, extra seconds of head-down time when you need to change a radio frequency or something. Map as many controls as possible to your HOTAS where you can remember their location by feel.

Q: What kind of sim flying is VR best for?

The kind where you want to experience your aircraft and drink in a nicely done aircraft model. Planes with a lot of external geometry visible from the seat, like biplanes or twins with big engines beside you like a C310 or P-38, look especially cool. Any kind of cockpit, whether it's a little Pitts hole or a big flight deck with a cute copilot, benefits equally from the VR experience if it's well modeled. You'll see and appreciate details that were invisible on a screen. Once you are on autopilot, you can even physically get up and sit in another seat, or walk back into the cabin if your actual room is big enough, in a true 360 degree, 1:1 scale environment.

Aerobatic flying and abrupt maneuvers in VR can be a little stomach-turning. The headset isolates you from any fixed point of reference, so there's a disagreement between what your eyes are seeing and what your guts and inner ear are telling you that is not resolved by seeing stuff in your room next to your monitor. I can do a full acro routine without barfing, but not quite without thinking about barfing. The other moment that gives me a twinge is the moment the plane comes to a complete stop after taxiing in. I just can't get used to seeing the plane come to a stop without feeling the deceleration.

On the other hand, the spatial awareness that comes with VR can improve piloting in certain ways. I find it much easier to do slips on approach in VR, and I think my turn coordination and landings are generally better, although VR tends to create the illusion that you are higher off the runway than you are, so I am touching down a little earlier than I expect.

Helicopter flying is probably great in VR because you can get up close to things for a good 3D look. I still haven't quite got the hang of choppers but this is an incentive for more practice.

For me personally, it is also nice that my VR headset doesn't care about the ambient lighting conditions. On a clear winter day like today, when the sun comes through my south-facing window and lights me up to a degree that hopelessly confuses my TrackIR, VR is the only way I can fly. So that's nice.

Q: What kind of sim flying is VR not so good for?

If you want to enjoy MSFS's wonderful scenery, you might be better off going back to the monitor. There's no stereo 3D effect in VR of anything that far away, and the graphic quality and panoramic field of view are so reduced that scenery peeping is not very rewarding. When you go back to your monitor on the graphics settings you're accustomed to, you'll be amazed how sharp, saturated, and generally better it looks. And more animated, with all the traffic settings turned up.

If you typically make use of a lot of other open windows while in MSFS, such as Little Navmap, other charts and navaids, etc., VR may be difficult for you. There are apps for looking at PDF files and browser windows from within the 3D environment, but reading documents in VR is no fun. It will be hard to make out the fine print and it will be artificial and immersion-breaking. Plus, all those open windows are using CPU and GPU resources and costing you frames per second. The good news is that it is fairly easy to pop in and out of VR within a flight, so you can get your route and procedures all sorted on the monitor, program your nav instruments as desired, then go to VR for the actual flying, with maybe the occasional jump back to 2D to check an approach plate or whatever. So far I mainly stick to VFR in VR and rely on either the aircraft's GPS unit or the toolbar VFR map to figure out where I'm going.

Vatsim and multiplayer are going to be a bit of a challenge with VR, but doable if you're very familiar with the procedures and don't need to look up a lot of stuff. I'm still ironing this out but really want to make it work, because the audio interaction and the display of Vatsim air traffic would add a lot to the immersiveness that VR provides.

Q: How is the sound?

Meh, okay I guess. After the first few minutes, I turned off the headset sound and went back to my speakers. I prefer the ambient noise of my aircraft to be ambient, not piped into my ears, and have nice speakers with a subwoofer for engine rumbles etc. that sounds far better than the headset speakers. I wish I could pipe just the voice from ATC into the headset, but so far I can't, because Windows and MSFS don't recognize the headset as a speaker. I think the headset mic picks up a lot of ambient noise, too, so it's not great for Vatsim. I'm actually sticking my old headphones and mic over the VR headset now when on Vatsim, which seems a little silly but is the way that works best for now.

Q: Can I use it with glasses?

Modestly sized glasses will fit in the unit, but I don't like it. The peephole effect is even worse if you wear glasses and have to use a spacer that moves your eyes farther from the headset lenses. Glasses make it more difficult to make fine adjustments in the position of the headset on your face, and a few millimeters of such adjustments can determine whether you see any sharp sweet spot or not. Personally, I found that the vignetting became unacceptable and dug out some old contact lenses to use when I'm doing VR. The alternative is to get corrective lenses that go into the headset, which I'll probably do eventually, but I'm willing to bet that they further reduce the sharpness and add more chromatic aberration.

Q: Is it good with sims other than MSFS?

Yes, I've used it with P3Dv4, P3Dv5, IL2:Great Battles, and a couple of car sims, Assetto Corsa and Project Cars 2. VR actually improves all of those more than it improves MSFS.

Q: Really? Which is best?

The best experiences I've had have been in IL2, where I get nice frame rates with relatively little dialing down of settings, the entire game UI is usable through the headset, the cockpits are beautifully modeled, the systems are simplified with nothing to click in the cockpit anyway, and the entire experience is just the visceral joy of flying the old fighters. The only real downside is the difficulty of looking around you because of the FOV limitations and the need for 1:1 head turning. I guess you could argue that's at least partly authentic to the real-life experience, but I could do without the authentic neck strain.

Q: How about P3D?

P3Dv4 and v5's VR support is excellent and with their lighter graphics processing load, it is easier to maintain good frame rates, and they never CTD. From the cockpit, many older planes made for P3D and FSX look fantastic in VR. It really rejuvenates the old sim. I'm going through my over 400 installed planes in P3D and experiencing their cockpit modeling in a new light - not always a flattering new light, but quite often. Of course the FSX/P3D era products from the best publishers like Aeroplane Heaven, Milviz, Just Flight, Carenado/Alabeo, Flight Replicas, A2A/Aircraft Factory, Aerosoft, Vertigo, etc. are consistently beautiful; you would think they were designed for VR originally. The ones from the next tier of publishers, like RealAir, Golden Age Sims, Iris, CR1, Virtavia, and Flysimware are a bit more hit/miss but a lot of it is excellent. And then there are our favorite freeware authors, like Rob Richardson, the late Tim Piglet Conrad, Dave Molyneaux, Dave Garwood, Milton Shupe, Stuart Green, Manfred Jahn and many others, whose work holds up beautifully in 3D. It's a pleasure to fly these old planes again and the 3D cockpit takes the focus off of that bad P3D scenery. P3D also has the pop-up instruments and controls which can be a big help, especially the radios and GPS units. For that reason, plus the greater stability and computing power headroom, I might be inclined to use P3D rather than MSFS for any VR Vatsim flying.

Q: What about the car sims?

In some ways VR does the most for car sims, because the other cars and track elements are close enough to you that there's still a 3D stereo effect associated with them, and it's helpful in judging your turns and positioning. Negotiating Bannochbrae in an old Ferrari in the rain has been among the most fun I've had with the Reverb thus far.

Q: What about smut? Is it good for smut?

I'm afraid I have no idea what you are talking about.

Q: So are you glad you did it?

I don't regret the $300 I spent on my unit. At the full price of $600, I might regret it. I won't use it for all of my flying. Right now I'm binging on it, but it will probably settle back to about half my flying in MSFS. Probably I will use it 100% of the time in P3D, IL2, and the driving sims though.

August