Indie Project ‘Tinker Pilot’ Aims for Deep Immersion with Highly Customizable VR Cockpits

Simulator fans know the score: despite offering less pixel-dense displays than traditional monitor setups, there’s not much else besides VR that will let you step into (and haphazardly wreck) exotic luxury cars, fighter jets, and even your very own sci-fi spaceship. To that tune, indie developers Tinker Pilot Team have announced an ambitious new project that aims to let users import their own 3D digital objects into their upcoming space flight sim.

The idea is to provide users with the ability to create their own 1:1 flying experience by matching up digital counterparts to things you might already have around the house, such as HOTAS flight sticks, cup holders, or even things like fans.

Essentially, the project is aiming to let users create the same sort of ‘hyper reality’ VR effects that location-based entertainment facilities such as The Void provide; having that physical object match up to an in-game representation makes for a potent shot of immersion to say the least.

The creators make no mention of specific game mechanics, or an open-world environment, so it remains to be seen if Tinker Pilot will include these things at all, making it less of an Elite Dangerous-style experience (eg. online play, trading missions, pirating operations, etc.) and more like a hardware hacker’s space-based dream machine.

The studio isn’t just producing a game though. They’re also building a Unity software tool dubbed ‘TinkerCore VR System’ that they say can be used to turn “any Unity experience into an immersive 1:1 VR experience.” Outside of its ability to let users with Unity know-how to import 3D objects, it also implements a serial communication interface to “connect with specific hardware such as microcontrollers in order to handle specific situations,” the studio says on their website.

“[The Unity tool] has been created to provide Tinker Pilot with the best possible piloting feeling, but its universal nature can make it suitable for quite different experiences,” the studio concludes.