I decided that the time was right to finally build a proper flight simulator at home. It uses three 42" LCD displays arranged around the pilot to cover a 270 degree field of view, and has a proper yoke, pedals, and throttle for control. All the rendering is done by a single Intel i7 PC with a Nvidia GTX 660 from 2 years ago. The new X-Plane 11 beta supports multiple displays really well. With the three large displays, you get an incredibly immersive experience, and you can easily look out the left and right windows. You can "feel" the aircraft as it rolls around, it is really awesome.

I've been waiting to do something like this since 1990 as a kid, when I played Flight Simulator 4 on my 286 with a little 14" CRT monitor. But anything bigger was impossibly expensive. Around 2002, when I was a PhD student at the University of South Australia, I borrowed a bunch of expensive projectors and used a cluster of 4 synchronized PCs using FSUIPC to build an immersive experience. It was pretty nice, but the projectors made doing a full wraparound difficult, and it required too much space and equipment. Now it is 2017, 42" televisions are cheap, and a single GPU from 2 years ago can easily drive four outputs at 1920x1080. I used some shelving racks in my garage to hold the monitors, and some custom wood frames to support all the controls.

This project has been a good learning experience to see how it feels and what needs to be improved. I can use more custom wood frames to bring the monitors tighter together, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. So here are some panoramic photos and videos that try to show what it looks like!

Update: June 2017 I have now ported Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 to work in my immersive flight simulation set up. Check out my new blog post for more details.

Update: June 2019 I now have a project page describing the many plugins and apps I have written for X-Plane and home cockpits.