What's your opinion on seats with haptic feedback and VR for flight simulators?
Even in this case, I would say the simulator has specific strengths, and that is to teach instrument flying procedures. Landing the simulator is pretty different than landing the real thing, there is some negative transfer (the bad habits I was referring to).
Retail flight simulator flight models are just toys. They don't do a good job of simulating the behavior of the airplane close to the ground (e.g. during landing), nor are even the expensive ones necessarily accurate at the edge of the flight envelope (near/at stall).
I don't think haptic seat and VR change much, you are still better off getting into a real plane and just flying. You can probably do quite a bit of flying for the cost of all this gear.
The hexapod both provides acceleration and rotates to use gravity to simulate continuous acceleration.
The brilliant part is that it trade between these two modes below human vestibular thresholds. So you can’t tell whether your sense of acceleration is coming from movement or orientation.
I took a flight physiology course with Larry Young who modeled the human vestibular system as a set of feedback loops with known gains. And an awesome graduate course entirely on flight simulation.
Indeed.
And unlike your haptic seat and VR, you can't hit pause on a real plane whilst you go have a shit, eat dinner or answer a phone call. :)