MSc Dissertation: educational VR flight sim

 Forgot to brag about recently getting my Master's degree!

A few years ago I had enrolled in a Computer Science postgraduate studies programme. While I attended and passed all the necessary courses within the first two semesters, I had postponed my dissertation since I was too busy with my parallel full-time and part-time jobs at the time.

Yet, last summer I was finally able to complete and present my dissertation successfully! It's focused on a cooperative VR flight simulator environment that I developed, where two pilots (instructor and student) share the same virtual space in a fighter jet cockpit.

This setup allows the pilots to see each other's hands interacting with the controls, which helps the student understand how certain actions need to be carried out, and helps the instructor notice and correct any mistakes early, as well as explain procedures in a more direct way.

The users utilize two Meta Quest VR headsets running the interlinked VR app that I made. Both see the same VR view, but one is declared as the instructor and has some additional admin controls. A flight simulation software (FlightGear) runs on a separate computer in the same network, and the VR app instances communicate with it, sending the user control interactions and receiving the aircraft flight data. 

Pilots tried the VR application and gave feedback on it. The project was demonstrated live by a professor and me during the dissertation presentation, all went smoothly (landing could have been a bit smoother 😄) and the conclusion is I got my diploma earlier this year!

The application development, the user study and the writing of the dissertation were overall quite a challenge, but I'm glad I had this experience and something cool to show for it.

Lots of other stuff have happened since my last catch-up here, but I'll save those for a later post.

-Kostas

P.S. a quick demo video from the WIP phase of the VR app in action: