“Microsoft Flight Simulator” is revealing itself to be a landmark game, particularly this last week with two disasters.
Earlier this week, scientists and novice stormchasers used the game to observe the already-devastating Hurricane Laura as it barreled toward through the Gulf of Mexico and on our shores. “Flight Simulator,” released this month for PC, streams the entire planet Earth in real-time, feeding in weather data from Swiss-based meteorological service Meteoblue and bolstered by the power of Microsoft’s Azure AI platform.
“The first time I heard that the game featured live weather and live traffic, I wanted to see just how far it could go,” said Simon Coudé, an astronomer with the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a project funded by NASA to build and maintain an airborne space observatory. “So when I heard there were a couple of tropical storms developing in the Caribbeans during the weekend, that was the perfect opportunity to test the limits of their system. I imagine that’s the closest I’ll ever be to a storm chaser!”
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Coudé was also intrigued because he had heard players found evidence of the California forest fires being realized in the game as fog. Sure enough, players found significant levels of cloud activity where the fires took place.
The weather system isn’t perfect. The Washington Post tested this out by flying into the hurricane: Wind speeds were clearly inaccurate, as it was a relatively smooth flight headed toward the outer edges of the storm. The clouds also didn’t swirl, though from a satellite view within the game, an eye is clearly formed.
Virtual stormchasers would also miss out on the swirling stadium effect of being inside the eye of a hurricane, as this Reddit users demonstrates.
“Microsoft Flight Simulator” is a combination of global data from Bing Maps satellite data and the Azure AI cloud system to process and recreate the entire planet. At launch, the game rendered 5 billion houses and 2 trillion trees across the planet, all of which is subject to change as the world changes. The game also pulls in real-time air traffic and weather data to mirror real-world activity.
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“There’s also a complete airflow system,” Jorg Neumann, head of the “Flight Simulator” team, told The Post. He’s worked at Microsoft for over two decades. “Imagine real particles floating across the entire planet, hitting things like skyscrapers to correctly create turbulence on the other side. Also, when they go up the mountains, the air actually cools off, and as it goes down the mountain, it heats up and speeds up, creating that turbulence.”
It was Neumann who pushed Microsoft to release “Flight Simulator” with a representation of Earth that looks photorealistic. The idea didn’t take root until he was inspired by the Microsoft HoloLens project, which gave players a virtual tour of Machu Picchu. While clearly imperfect, the features in “Flight Simulator” are exciting not just for virtual scientists who want to study weather patterns safely, but for game developers and those seeking other tech applications as well.
“I think the maturation of the cloud industry in just the last three or four years has grown tremendously,” said Eric Boyd, Corporate Vice President of Azure Artificial Intelligence. Boyd himself has been a “Flight Simulator” fan since its first release in 1982. The “Flight Simulator” brand is among the oldest owned by Microsoft, even older than Windows.
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“Ideas that we didn’t really have the infrastructure [for] before, now we do,” Boyd said. “What if you had the world’s largest computer and these massive amounts of data you can tap into? Now we have that ability."
Read more:
Tracking Hurricane Laura: Map and times of arrival
22 weather terms you ought to know for hurricane season
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