Client: Certify-ED — drone-pilot certification education. The simulator ships in certified educational centers, where it trains student pilots before they touch a real aircraft.

Live demo: certify-ed-demo.verybigthings.com

The gap between passing a written UAS exam and safely flying a real aircraft is where student pilots crash their first drone. Real practice is expensive and hard to standardize: drones break, weather varies, and an instructor can't schedule a windy day. Certify-ED wanted students to build stick instincts before touching hardware — in the browser, on any classroom machine, with a VR option for full immersion.

A browser-based drone flight simulator, built as a game and taught like a curriculum:

A real flight model in exam vocabulary. The sim teaches LIFT, WEIGHT, THRUST and DRAG, controlled through ROLL, PITCH, YAW and THROTTLE — the same terms the certification course tests — with VLOS (visual line of sight) discipline built into the missions rather than mentioned in a footnote.

Progressive levels. A guided tutorial walks the first flight key by key ("use W to increase your lift"), then missions layer on tasks across different terrains and weather conditions.

Mission mechanics that mirror real UAS work. Deploying a lifesaver payload, taking aerial photographs, switching to the drone's POV camera — the jobs commercial pilots actually certify for, not just hoops in the sky.

A score screen that makes failure cheap. Completed tasks, total time, and a crash counter close every level. Crashing costs nothing here — which is exactly the point of a simulator.

An arcade wrapper. Synthwave briefing screens, pixel-art buttons, a START!!! that means it — training that a teenager finishes because it feels like a game, not a module.

Stylized world over photoreal. The low-poly canyon reads instantly — speed, scale and obstacles are legible in a way photoreal terrain isn't — and it holds frame rate on ordinary school laptops, where this actually gets used. It also sets the emotional register: crashing into an orange polygon mesa is an arcade retry, not a $1,200 mistake.

The physics vocabulary is the exam vocabulary. Every force and movement the sim names is a term the student will meet again on the certification test, so flight time doubles as study time.

Built on Three.js, shipped in a browser tab. No install, no GPU requirement, no app store — the distance between "assigned in class" and "flying" is one click. The same build runs on Oculus headsets for full immersion and takes gamepad input, so the classroom's hardware decides how it's flown, not the software.