Full-motion platform, seat-belt tensioner, bass shakers — and your real cockpit perfectly mixed into DCS. Community best practices, proven on a complete F/A-18C pit on a motion platform.
Motion platforms are hard on MR setups: the platform motion can confuse the headset's inside-out tracking, and on rigs with strong haptics a mounted controller gets shaken so much that controller-tracked masks suffer. This guide shows one community-proven recipe for exactly that situation: world-anchored masks, the Quest's Travel Mode, and hand passthrough — no controller mount needed. A rigidly mounted controller remains a fully valid approach (see the controller tracking guide), especially on rigs with milder motion — pick whichever fits your hardware.
This guide builds on the normal PassthroughForge setup: Quest 3 (or Pico / Pimax), Virtual Desktop with a chroma-key passthrough environment, and PSF masks working in a static cockpit. If you are not there yet, do the Getting Started guide first, then come back.
A motion platform is, as far as the headset is concerned, a moving vehicle: the world the cameras see moves with you while the IMU feels acceleration. Without help, that mismatch causes drift, wobble and the occasional full re-orient mid-flight. Meta's Travel Mode exists exactly for this situation — its tracking is tuned for moving environments (officially airplanes and trains, and it works remarkably well on motion rigs).
Video walkthrough — or see Meta's official Travel Mode help page with step-by-step screenshots.
With masks covering your panels you can already see the pit — but your hands (and anything outside a mask, like a Stream Deck on the side) also need to be visible. Virtual Desktop can cut your real hands into the picture using the Quest's hand tracking:
For frequently used gear that should always be visible (Stream Decks, radio panels), don't rely on the hand cutout — give them their own small PSF mask instead. Hands come and go; masks stay.
Mounting a controller to the rig is a proven way to keep masks glued to a moving cockpit — and it stays perfectly legitimate on motion rigs too. But if your rig has a seat-belt tensioner or strong bass shakers, the mount gets bounced around constantly and the mask shakes with it. For that case, this recipe simply doesn't track anything:
DCS renders cockpit displays fairly dark in VR and offers little to brighten them in-sim — through passthrough-tinted lenses your DDIs and the AMPCD can become hard to read. The community fix is ReShade (6.x with full add-on support) plus the VR Enhancer Mod (VREM), a ReShade add-on built for DCS in OpenXR VR:
The passthrough image is only as good as what the headset cameras can see. Two rules make the difference between a murky video feed and a crisp cockpit:
| Symptom | Fix |
|---|---|
| Cockpit / masks drift or re-orient while the platform moves | Travel Mode is off — enable it (step 2). Recenter once after enabling. |
| Masks vibrate with every bump | A mask is still controller-tracked. Set Tracking = None (World) — step 4. |
| Hands invisible over Stream Deck / panels | Enable Show Hands in Virtual Desktop (step 3), or give that panel its own mask. |
| MFDs too dark to read | ReShade + VREM (step 5); also raise cockpit display brightness in the aircraft. |
| Passthrough grainy / dark | More light on the pit (step 6). The cameras need it. |
| Masks misaligned after a DCS recenter | Press Recenter All Masks in PSF with your head briefly still (step 4). |
Stuck? Jump on our Discord — several motion-rig owners (including the pilot whose setup inspired this guide — thanks, Joe!) hang out there and love comparing notes.