VRFS is a project that was developed for ZHAW School of Engineering to help aviation students better understand the physics of airplanes and how different parameters affect the trajectory of an airplane. It's developed in Unity (http://unity3d.com) using the VRTK (https://github.com/thestonefox/VRTK) for the VR interactions. Our focus was to develop not only something to spectate, but also something that lets the user interact and play with as we believe that this is the most exciting way to learn new stuff.
It offers some really cool features like:
- Realtime calculation of airplane trajectories based on real physics calculations
- Configure the airplane like wing area, max thrust and the polar curve
- Configure the pilots interactions like angle of attack or thrust
- Clone simulations and adjust them for comparison
- Let animated airplanes fly on your configured trajectories
- Learn how the different parameters affect the trajectory
As we progressed, several new ideas came up and there were just not enough hours available to implement them all. Here's a list of features that might come in at some point:
- Aircraft sounds
- Select between different airplane types (visuals)
- Export data and save configured simulations
- 2D visuals of the trajectories for more detailed comparison
- Configure temperature and wind velocity
And some features that would probably take a lot of work to do but still would be interesting and worth mentioning:
- Craft your own aircrafts
- Terraineditor
- Add local wind (to simulate microbursts)
- Weather effects
- AR version
to be defined...