There've been a number of plays I've been up to. The tacit nature of them made it are very hard to report on, written or verbal. All of them take place in VR (talking about VR is like singing about architecture).

Some day I'm going nail down delivering tacit knowledge with words. But before that happens here's a feeble attempt at presenting one.

Ultrawings 2 is not-so-new VR game. It looks cartoonish, no self-respecting pilot would take it seriously. I bought this title on discount thinking I would fly a plane in VR to wind down a day.

Boy am I wrong.

The game puts me on a classic propeller plane (at first). The controls are realistic, in that it's all too easy to fly like a mad man, making exaggerated turns you're not supposed to in real-life.

The cartoon quality of the game does not matter. The immersiveness of the environment is enough to make me dizzy each time I make a drastic move in the sky. It feels the same as the after-effect of reading in a moving car.

Even the most high resolution rendering of Microsoft Flight Simulator wouldn't make you dizzy on a flat screen.

I found out it's called spatial disorientation, even professional pilots get it. Apparently the trick is to not rely on visuals (just don't look out the windows). Rely instead on cockpit instruments for bearings. This I didn't expect to have to learn, which I don't mind.

And I haven't even gotten to dogfights yet. There's no hope there if I don't fix disorientation first.

Landing a plane is tricky, this is common knowledge. It took me a dozen crashes before getting the hang of it. I can imagine how frustrating and costly it must be for old-time pilots to have to learn landing the hard way. The hours and fuel they had to burn without the benefit of zero-cost failure must be staggering.

The tactileness and immersiveness of VR tend to allow skills to leak into the real-world, much more smoothly than what gamepad-controlled game consoles allows for. This is the tacit bit that I'm not sure is ever expressible.

Having said that, let's talk about fist-fighting in VR in the next post.