Some early experimental results with teen and young adults “Ab Initio” interaction with Microsoft Flight.A word of caution. This research is informal, as it utilizes past participants of a recently concluded scientific study of a new approach to “deeply integrated” and “in context” flight training, who have agreed to recruit persons from within their own social contact group to participate.Personal Computer based Flight Simulation, as a game category, has suffered the worst customer retention, duration of play, and satisfaction statistics. Related statistics are reflected in research with regard to the low completion rates (80% Drop Out rate) of students who initiate General Aviation Private Pilot flight instruction. [1]Microsoft Flight Simulator, after an estimated 20 million copies sold over the past 30 years, is said to have a retained user base of only 40,000 who continue to purchase add-on products. [2]Success it seems, is largely determined by grit, determination, and passion. Your basic "best of the best", "Top Gun", "A type" personalities who are a tiny minority.Microsoft Flight was promoted to be a clean sheet approach to flight simulation, focused primarily on reaching those persons not previously exposed to the flight simulation game category. In an effort to assess the effectiveness of Flight in this regard, past participants were directed to solicit the participation of their friends, who had no prior exposure to flight simulation, nor prior participation in flight training. From this group, 34 have agreed to participate by installing Microsoft Flight, and to be interviewed. The ages of the participants range from 14 to 24 years old. Three users identified having had the program terminate upon their initial first use, however all have succeeded upon the next attempt.Initial Findings:All participants voiced a high level of frustration with Missions Tutorial 1 – Flight Essentials, with 14 (nearly half) of the participants giving up and uninstalling Flight! The remaining 20 participants completed Wedding Party and Tutorial 2-Landing. Of the 20 which advanced to complete Tutorial 1, none succeeded in fewer than 8 repeated attempts. These participants found the Icon A5 a fun aircraft to fly.Harsh feedback clearly indicates that the instructor is having a strong negative effect on the participant’s ability to maintain sufficient attention to the control task, thereby distracting and disrupting the participant from acquiring confidence sufficient to propel them forward in the instructor guided training. None of the participants has expressed an interest in pursuing the Stearman intro Mission. They have become negatively biased and intimidated against any further interaction with the instructor.Is there no one on the Microsoft Flight Team who is an expert in Human Factors, with an emphasis on the acquisition of Perceptual Motor Skills?This is a direct threat to the core premise of the product! And immediate action by Microsoft is urgently required!I can only guess that this was not picked up in the Beta due to the self selection bias of the participants, the majority of which are likely to have been past users of Microsoft Flight Simulator.A Certified Flight Instructor exhibiting this level of “negative transference of skills” would soon find themselves without students and collecting food stamps. However this alone is not the failure of a weak CFI, as there should have been an expert in Human Factors on the Flight team which would have immediately identified and corrected this issue. The hiring of a Human Factors expert is the single most important decision that could be made given Joshua Howard’s stated goal of growing the franchise to 20 million active users [3]. [1] http://www.flyingmag...irect/stop-loss[2] http://forum.avsim.n...34#entry2101534[3] http://seattletimes....ht_boss_on.html

Edited March 4, 201214 yr by jmangan

"Human Factors"?Get real, it´s Microsoft, awesome company, but made by a geek, for geeks, period...Dunno why Steven Jobs didn´t make a Sim... :Nerd:

Edited March 4, 201214 yr by Tor

Wow its awesome man, lets smoke some more.

Interestingg results, were the participants truly random or do they have a common background?

The participant group members are unknown to each other. They were recruited by participants in a larger unrelated scientific study recently concluded.

Edited March 4, 201214 yr by jmangan

Interesting report. Can it be replicated with several other random groups?Nota bene: I wholeheartedly agree that simply dumping everyone into the first flight with no warning whatsoever was not the brightest way that could have been done......which most of the beta team objected to most strenuously.There should have been a still screen with a bit of brief dialog advising about the first two lessons, as well as providing a way to "Opt Out" for those who're already familiar with the basics of flying (yoke or stick to steer, pull-back to climb, push-forward to descend, throttle to control airspeed, and landing).It was also recommended that a longer period of straight and level flight (say 20 seconds or so) before the first balloon would have been better...

Hard to know for certain, as I was able to quickly constitute the participant group using peer connections from the previous study.This finding appears to be well supported given the strenuous objections you identified by the beta team.Sounds like all of the warnings signs were present and yet ignored.Sadly you only get one shot at getting it mostly right as "first impressions are everything" and hard to displace once established.

Edited March 4, 201214 yr by jmangan

Very interesting, I was curious if any group studies had been done on retention of users in flight simulator. It would be very interesting to see several samples of ~50 going through the same process with Flight, FSX, X-Plane, etc. See what the initial reactions are and which sim retains the largest number of users.

Hello Jmangan,Welcome to AVSIM. I hope that you will enjoy participation in this community and find it as beneficial and fun as most of us have.Kind regards,

My background is in the development of engineering "iron bird", "simulation to flight test mission rehearsal", and "Human Factors" research simulators.The recently completed scientific study examines the potential to use PC Flight Simulator Enthusiasts (Flight, FSX, X-Plane, Flightgear, VATSIM, IVAO) as"virtual test pilots" to carry out flight test objectives in order to accomplish 1 billion hours of simulated flight testing.The next generation of Avionics are far too complex to test by traditional means.It costs $1000 for every line of source code, and next generation commercial aircraft will have 20 million lines of code.Boeing and Airbus will have to crowdsource testing for it to be economical.However, this effort will require 200 million "TestPilots" at a minimum to succeed in achieving 1 billion hours of testing,We developed a "virtual Certified Flight Instructor" or vCFI, which is the subject of the research study.The idea is to have future aircraft fully simulated in a web browser executing a copy of the actual avionics software.Now that the 24 month research project has concluded, we are releasing it as open source, and will be launching afundraising campaign thru kickstarter and indiegogo to develop the first "reference aircraft"."Funders" will choose which "reference aircraft" will be developed Boeing 787, Airbus A380, Airbus A350, or Bombardier C-Series.The press release with further details is on our company blog.http://coandaaero.wordpress.com/

Edited March 4, 201214 yr by jmangan

Thank you for providing some background bona-fides, as it does lend strength to your report experiments.

Wow, I'm intrigued.

It would be very interesting to see several samples of ~50 going through the same process with Flight, FSX, X-Plane

HelloMost would not get past the option screen in X-Plane, I would love to see a study done on that UI

Whats the confidence level on a sample size that tiny?

My background is in the development of engineering "iron bird", "simulation to flight test mission rehearsal", and "Human Factors" research simulators.The recently completed scientific study examines the potential to use PC Flight Simulator Enthusiasts (Flight, FSX, X-Plane, Flightgear, VATSIM, IVAO) as"virtual test pilots" to carry out flight test objectives in order to accomplish 1 billion hours of simulated flight testing.The next generation of Avionics are far too complex to test by traditional means.It costs $1000 for every line of source code, and next generation commercial aircraft will have 20 million lines of code.Boeing and Airbus will have to crowdsource testing for it to be economical.However, this effort will require 200 million "TestPilots" at a minimum to succeed in achieving 1 billion hours of testing,We developed a "virtual Certified Flight Instructor" or vCFI, which is the subject of the research study.The idea is to have future aircraft fully simulated in a web browser executing a copy of the actual avionics software.Now that the 24 month research project has concluded, we are releasing it as open source, and will be launching afundraising campaign thru kickstarter and indiegogo to develop the first "reference aircraft"."Funders" will choose which "reference aircraft" will be developed Boeing 787, Airbus A380, Airbus A350, or Bombardier C-Series.The press release with further details is on our company blog.http://coandaaero.wordpress.com/

Welcome to avsim and thanks for the info . This a good read for some guys so they can have a clue of the cust involve on something like this .