We’ve had fun over the past few weekends playing with Microsoft’s 2020 release of Flight Simulator.

With a new world map utilising Bing Maps’ satellite imagery and AI to re-create the terrain of the entire planet and populate it with building models, vegetation and water, we wondered whether the game would be useful as an analysis tool. And indeed it is, allowing us to pay flying visits to sites currently blocked by physical travel restrictions.

Utilising our pretty hotted-up laptops, we loaded the package via Xbox game pass and installed high-resolution files for our target area to reduce internet usage. Using Google Maps, we retrieved the GPS coordinates for the site, entering them into the simulator as our destination, with the nearest airport as our departure point (not strictly necessary, but we wanted to keep the experience real). Setting the AI to pilot the plane (I can barely drive a car) we took off smoothly and enjoyed the incredible photorealistic rendering of lake and mountains as we flew three minutes to our target.

Pausing flight and toggling drone mode enabled us to take a good look at the site and context, using keystrokes to move in any direction, change zoom level, pan and yaw. While the Bing imagery is not as up-to-date as Google Earth, and the building models in this western part of China are a bit dodgy (a temple was rendered as a 10 storey office building) the terrain feels fairly accurate. Unlike when using Google Earth you can get an excellent feel for the ‘lie of the land’, and the environment is detailed enough to be used as a quick and dirty background for a building visualisation. The screen can easily be recorded to provide animated fly-arounds, complete with circulating traffic and accurate weather of the day. By setting your preferred time in the simulator a quick eyeball assessment of shading by the surrounding terrain is also possible.

As our flight-planning skills improve and we discover more of the capabilities and customisation options of the software, we can imagine this becoming a valuable tool in our analysis and presentation kit. Upgrades to the models will roll out progressively, a higher-res model of Japan has just been released. Happy to test for projects there, anyone?