Is the Hover flight simulator available?

Not yet. It's in development and this post is a preview. No release date announced.

Is the video showing the real Hover product?

Yes. The dashboard, live stream, telemetry, and gamepad control in the video are the real Hover product. The only simulated part is the aircraft itself.

What powers the simulator?

A real flight-dynamics stack (the same open-source autopilot software that flies physical drones) flies a virtual aircraft over photorealistic 3D city tiles. The rendered camera is encoded to H.264 and enters Hover through the same pipeline a real drone's video uses.

We're building a flight simulator into Hover (here it is flying Bogotá)

What you're watching: the standard Hover dashboard, live, with an Xbox controller flying a simulated drone over photorealistic Bogotá. Everything on screen is the real product. The only simulated part is the aircraft. In development, not released yet.

Everything except the drone is real

Look at the edges of the frame. That's the Hover dashboard you get when you sign up today: the live WHEP stream with its H.264 badge, the latency readout, the telemetry overlay, the recording panel, the gamepad card showing an Xbox controller in control. It's a normal deployment, live, on a normal account.

The video coming into it just doesn't come from a camera. It comes from a virtual aircraft flying over a photorealistic Bogotá built from Google's 3D tiles.

How it works

A real flight-dynamics stack flies the virtual drone: the same open-source autopilot software that flies physical aircraft, so the thing you're steering banks, drifts, and settles like a drone rather than a video-game camera. A cloud renderer draws the world around it from photorealistic 3D city tiles. The rendered camera view is encoded to H.264 and enters Hover through exactly the same pipeline a real drone's video uses. The dashboard can't tell the difference, because there isn't one: same ingest, same live stream, same telemetry path, same controls.

That last part is the point. This isn't a separate simulator app with Hover branding. It's Hover, with a simulated aircraft plugged into the slot a real one occupies.

Why build it

Fly Hover without owning a drone. The fastest way to understand a live-video platform is to fly something on it. A simulator makes the first flight free and crash-proof.
Train without risk. New pilots can learn the controls, the camera, and the dashboard with zero airspace, battery, or hardware consequences.
Rehearse over the real city. The world is built from real 3D tiles, so you can practice a patrol route over the actual streets you operate on. We chose Bogotá for this preview deliberately: it's a city we work with.

Status

In development. Not released, no date announced. We're sharing it because it's a good look at how Hover is built: if video can get into the pipeline, Hover can carry it live, record it, and put controls next to it, whether the aircraft is real or not.

If you want to see what the pipeline does with a real drone today, start with the DJI livestream bench test or create an account.