If one in 2001 were asking "With the new, astonishing Il-2 flightsim in mind, what will Olegs flightsim look like in 9 years from now?" Well, the correct answer was "Pretty much like Il-2 as it is, but with more maps and more planes".
It is obvious that 9 years is not enough time to make giant leaps in flightsim development. Maybe 10 years are?

Skarphol

im thinking more about the hardware...what changes will we see there?

In 2 weeks+10 years+2 weeks, we'll be flying in full virtual environment, feeling everything :-)

I hope not!

I don't think I want to be shot, burned, crushed and fall realisticly to my death five times a night.

It might just put me off flight sims for life! :(

cheers!

Unless something radical happens we will see a continual evolution of hardware. A faster CPU, more cores, faster GPU probably with more cores there, some merging of CPU and GPU, etc. But all of this just equals greater performance for a cheaper cost with each evolution.

Next generation of monitors will probably be OLED based. You can do some fancy stuff with that potentially including curved surfaces and transparent monitors (until they are turned on). But it's the "same" as before.

So end result is a more graphically rich and more sophisticated (physics, sound, etc.) sim but nothing ground breaking. It's always just +1.

Come to think of it; I think 3D will be very well inkorporated within the next few years, either as 3D monitors, or with VR-glasses.

Skarphol

I remember them.

It was 1983, they were green tinted monochrome LCDs with no built in backlight, I think maybe the resolution was 80 columns of characters by 25 rows, there may not have been a pixel resolution at all, but if there was it was almost certainly 320 * 2xx. Sort of nice for the time, but expensive, not that big (12 inches diagonally? less?), and needed a strong lightsource behind them.

Wasn't that Soylent Red instead ? Watched it too many years ago, but some sequences are memorable ...

Ins

Nope. The preferred food of the masses was Soylent Green: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

Talk about 'being green' and 'recycling'. ;)

Back on topic, I suspect that as others have suggested, the biggest change is likely to be with display technology, though what form this will take is anyone's guess. Any 'all round' display is going to have problems with binocular vision, unless combined with shutter-type goggles, so a system based on a separate 'screen' for each eye - again goggle-based, might make more sense. On the other hand, they might just implant a microchip into your optic nerves...

Hehehehe, well, imagine a flight sim using some helmet/glasses where we see everything in photo-realistic 3D and hear almost-real sound.
That would really make us feel like it's real :)

Of course it will be totally prohibited to people with heart problems :P