Alright. This is very quick, and very dirty.
First - the fit (thankfully) works for me. It is an odd sort of system where you have to wear that back head strap lower, which sort of levers the headset up higher on your face. I feel the Rift is more comfortable, but the O+ is not terrible either. I do think that after many hours, the upper cloth portion of the forward “halo” might start to give you some forehead pressure pain. Maybe. I was in and out of mine so much that I couldn’t really tell you yet.
Setup and walking through the Mixed Reality Portal and introduction was fine. The little Cliff House (sort of like Oculus Home) is pretty and I still have a lot of exploring about what you can actually do there.
During the intro, I was pretty impressed by the brightness within the headset and the lack of screen door effect (SDE). It is not gone…but it IS much, much better. It feels more like there is a very, very fine cloth rather than pixels now. Hard to describe, and I do think there is a slight softening of the image, but text and things are easier to read.
Going back to fit for a minute - I am able to see some light through the nose area, very similar in my opinion to the Rift. The ability to peek through that gap is actually a bonus for me anyway…I like to be able to take a look at the screen without having to take the headset off. I didn’t try the “flashlight” feature yet.
Around the rest of the periphery, I had no light leakage. Maybe I just happen to have the right size face…lucky me. I even went so far as to take a headlamp and shine it all around the edges looking for light leaking in, but couldn’t see any.
As it sits on your face, you do feel like maybe it should have some ability to tilt at a hinge point at the top to allow you to pull the bottom part of the headset closer or tighter to your cheeks…which would also bring the lenses a tiny bit closer to your eyes. The low head band in the back causes the headset to want to sort of be levered away from the bottom, but again, my face seemed to fit it fine. But I can see what people are talking about that wish they could pull it more flush with their face. The Oculus does feel more secure in that regard.
The earphones seem the perfect length for me, and the sound quality was fine.
I adjusted my IPD using the little wheel on the bottom…and it did seem to match my measured IPD of 68.5 or so. Setting this properly does make a difference in whether you are feeling crosseyed or not.
Again, the brightness and lack of SDE is pretty darn striking. I’d venture to say that after a few minutes of playing a game, you don’t even see any real SDE at…even that kind of film/cloth look I was talking about. It is very, very subtle and I liked the image quality better than the Rift. I can see how people are excited to perhaps watch TV or movies in it…it is way better.
Now, I did make a mistake that I wouldn’t learn of until just at the end of my couple hours of testing the O+. I had read about how the lenses are pretty close to your eyes, and some people were complaining about the fit of glasses while in the headset. So I elected to put my contact lenses in. This actually results in a much more blurry image in the O+ (and the Rift) because they are really compromise lenses for flying that don’t really do near or far vision very good…they are sort of “betweeners”. So my first hour and a half of flying around, I had no idea the clarity would be quite a bit better when I took my contacts off later and put my specs on.
So with my contacts in, I fired up DCS World and it popped up on my monitor showing side by side VR imagery, but I couldn’t see anything in my headset. Sigh. Google. Oh…I need to have the WMR version of Steam VR installed…! Did that, and I was able to launch into DCS VR. It looked great. I did do some comparisons between the Rift and O+ with regards to gauge readability. There was an improvement for sure, but it wasn’t really totally overwhelming. But that was with my contacts in…so now I’ll have to go back and try it tomorrow with my glasses in (it makes that big of a difference for me anyway…). Head tracking seemed good. The smooth look of the picture with the anti-SDE is really, really nice. I was hardly aware of any pixels.
I did not really see Gods Rays…but there was a time or two that I saw the concentric type rings of the lenses…but really just barely, and only at a certain angle of my head and internal, in game light source. As a matter of fact, I think I saw it only once when I was looking up at the blue sky, and I tried to find the rings again as I played the rest of the night and I couldn’t manage to see them again.
I had been reading about the larger “sweet spot” in the O+ where the image quality is very good. I thought the imagery was pretty good, better than the Rift, but not like “have a parade for this” good. I was seeing some warping or distortion at the very top and bottom of the FOV. Having switched to glasses for the last 30 minutes, I think it was the edges of my contact lenses that were actually causing that perception oddly enough.
I flew around in the F-5 so I could look at the tiny lettering on the gauges. Readability is better…but I wouldn’t say you’d never have to lean in to check out something more closely. The Hornet, Harrier, and C-101 looked awesome. I just tooled around in them a little bit.
Fired up VTOL VR…and it looks great. No SDE and even though it has simpler graphics style, the cleaner, clearer, and brighter picture of the O+ does improve it.
The O+ controllers are OK, and I’ll get used to them, but the Oculus Touch controllers just have such better feel to them. They just fit your grasp better. I was disappointed to see that in VTOL VR the touch sensitive thumb pad is what controls the tilt vector and TGP now instead of the thumb sticks. I’d love to find a workaround for that.
Fired up X-Plane and it looked great. Better than ever. And it was right about then that I took my contacts out and put on a smaller and thinner old pair of glasses I have. They fit under the O+ just fine and seemed comfortable enough. The picture became much sharper, with less edge distortions. Now I’m mad that I wasted a couple hours wearing contacts when I could have been having better first impressions with contacts.
I also, just for giggles tried my WidmoVR lenses from my Rift in the O+. They won’t really sit in there properly since the interior of the headsets are different…but the image quality they broadcast was fantastic. I’ll definitely be ordering a new pair of insets for the O+ as soon as they verify that frames and stuff they are making are compatible with the O+ (they did have lenses for the OG Odyssey).
X-Plane ran great…and the headset made the plane cockpits come that much more alive. Again, I liked the picture quality, brightness, and lack of SDE better than the Rift.
I didn’t play any games yet…just DCS, X-Plane, and VTOL. I’ll revisit DCS tomorrow wearing my glasses to reform those opinions.
Overall, I think this is a very good diagonal step for a Rift owner. Yes, there are issues with the fit and comfort…hopefully a third party will come along with the answers to all the problems. I was lucky though in that the headset fit my head pretty darn well and I’ll definitely be keeping it.
Steam VR looked great in the O+ and I need to get in there and figure out some settings. I was using pixel density of 2.0 in DCS and I did not change anything in Steam VR…so whatever it was set at is what it was. I have a lot to learn about how this WMR type headset will best perform with other software.
So that’s about it. Just some initial impressions. Some rather poor pics I snapped with my iPhone 6+ through the left lens…trying to find the clearest spot to best illustrate the smooth looking display…
