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Hello all!

Bellingcat researcher Giancarlo Fiorella put together a really cool video showing how Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS2020) can be used as a verification tool.

Giancarlo walks you through the entire process of lifting off, moving the camera, and aligning it to recreate perspectives of photographs that need to be verified. Giancarlo uses the example of a photograph supposedly taken in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh area (between Armenia/Azerbaijan) that was shared by a Telegram group of Russian mercenaries. 

This video was a lot of fun to make and we hope to make some more of these fun video tutorials/walkthroughs, though the subject matter may not always bee quite as photogenic as the flight simulator game.

You can read the original article about the Karabakh photo here, and read Giancarlo's case study of using MSFS2020 as a verification tool here.

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Bellingcat Patreon Bonus: Using MSFS 2020 for Geolocation and Verification

Giancarlo Fiorella (twitter.com/gian_fiorella) walks through a case study of using Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 to identify landscapes supposedly in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in the contest region between Armenia/Azerbaijan.

Comments

Pontus Jensen Karlsson

I'm curious as to why the field of view gets distorted compared to google earth pro, is the map projection wrong somehow? Seems weird to me. Also the foliage could potentially be reduced by tampering with the detail settings in graphics.

James Hodgkinson

I'd say the field of view's more about the designers of the simulation/virtual cameras - some games you can change it, but a quick google shows it's not been possible in FS2020 yet