Head tracking is quite a nice middle ground. TrackIR is the best known commercial product but you can find free alternatives with DIY hardware.
With TrackIR (or equiv) you can see your surroundings, including your flight controllers. VR sure can be nice for some sightseeing when you're just flying around, but for longer flight simulation where you need to deal with radios, navigation equipment, aircraft systems, flaps, landing gear, etc it gets difficult. You need to have all of those buttons mapped and memorized so that you can find them without seeing them. I've heard some of the newest headsets have a camera for "seeing through" but I don't know how well they're suited to flight simming.
Before you ask: yeah, the picture doesn't move when your head moves. It's kinda like controlling the in-game camera with your nose. The response is non-linear (and configurable). Looking at the instruments in the cockpit is very natural, just glance at the location on the monitor and you meet in the middle. As you look further away from the middle, the response gets more non-linear so when you look at the edge of your screen you should see about +/- 90 degrees (perfect for general aviation). Really extreme angles like looking backwards isn't really needed for general aviation but if you do dogfighting, it's possible too but you might need to compromise a little bit with the non-linearity of the response.
I play MSFS with a TrackIR 5 head tracker and a medium-large 16:9 display and I use an Xbox gaming controller (with sensitivity at -70), keyboard and mouse. I've got a set of flight controllers in a box in the attic, but setting them up on the same desk where I work is too much to bother.
With TrackIR (or equiv) you can see your surroundings, including your flight controllers. VR sure can be nice for some sightseeing when you're just flying around, but for longer flight simulation where you need to deal with radios, navigation equipment, aircraft systems, flaps, landing gear, etc it gets difficult. You need to have all of those buttons mapped and memorized so that you can find them without seeing them. I've heard some of the newest headsets have a camera for "seeing through" but I don't know how well they're suited to flight simming.
Before you ask: yeah, the picture doesn't move when your head moves. It's kinda like controlling the in-game camera with your nose. The response is non-linear (and configurable). Looking at the instruments in the cockpit is very natural, just glance at the location on the monitor and you meet in the middle. As you look further away from the middle, the response gets more non-linear so when you look at the edge of your screen you should see about +/- 90 degrees (perfect for general aviation). Really extreme angles like looking backwards isn't really needed for general aviation but if you do dogfighting, it's possible too but you might need to compromise a little bit with the non-linearity of the response.
I play MSFS with a TrackIR 5 head tracker and a medium-large 16:9 display and I use an Xbox gaming controller (with sensitivity at -70), keyboard and mouse. I've got a set of flight controllers in a box in the attic, but setting them up on the same desk where I work is too much to bother.