Spotting in the headset
Put the headset on, hold the left grip, and a round eyepiece rises in front of your eyes showing a telephoto view of whatever you are looking at. That scope has been there for months. What it could not do until today was catch anything.
Spotting in VR was broken in three separate places, and each one was enough on its own. There was no button bound to the shutter: the desktop inputs are the P key and the right mouse button, and a headset has neither a keyboard nor the pointer lock the mouse path needs. The zoom gate could never be satisfied: both spotters refuse to identify anything unless the optical zoom is up, and the gull published a flat zero while presenting, because its zoom is a field-of-view change and the display owns its own projection in VR. And there was no feedback of any kind: the reticle, the lock ring and every result message are web overlays that a headset never composites, so even a catch that somehow landed would have shown you nothing.
All three are closed now, and the ritual is the same one you already know.
Hold the left grip to raise the scope. That counts as your optics. Put the crosshair in the middle of the eyepiece on a ship or an aircraft and hold it there. The dark rim of the binocular fills up as the lock builds, amber while it is working and green when it is ready. Then pull the right trigger.
The strip across the bottom of the eyepiece tells you where you are. It names what you are framing once the dossier releases the name, says hold it centred while the ring is filling, and switches to LOCKED · right trigger when the shot will land. After you take it, the result appears in the same place: the experience you earned, a world first, a rarity, or the reason the catch was refused.
Two details are worth knowing before you fly.
While the scope is raised the right trigger stops being the gull's wingbeat. That is deliberate. A wingbeat pitches the bird, and a pitch throws away the lock you just spent two seconds building, so one pull cannot be allowed to do both. Lower the scope and the trigger flaps again exactly as before.
A VR catch does not save a photo to your album. The screenshot path grabs the browser canvas, and during a headset session that canvas holds nothing worth keeping, so we would have stored a blank frame and then attached it to the card as proof. Better to have no photo than a false one. The card, the experience and the collection entry are all real.
There is also a new 🎮 Controls page in the VR menu listing every binding, including the ones you would never guess: the double-squeeze that turns the same grip into the walkie-talkie, the stick clicks that cycle the HUD and the map, and the modal trigger above.
An aircraft you already caught today still refuses to lock, the same as everywhere else. The eyepiece now says so instead of leaving you holding the crosshair on something that was never going to work.