Ok some first impressions, mostly regarding DCS.
Fit
- I have a long nose… the rubber light blocker has a bevel where it crosses the bridge of your nose. This was sharp enough to dig in and leave a line in my nose. Within minutes I decided to take out a razor and flush snips, cut the small bevel out, problem solved.
- The forehead pad doesn’t hurt, I can feel it but I don’t see it being a problem.
- The earphones do adjust vertically on a slider, they don’t go down as far as the rift but far enough for me.
- IPD - forgot I needed to adjust it, it came at the minimum by default and that’s what I needed.
- Only the top of the mask pad touches my face. I can tell this is easy to fix if I want to pursue it, the whole thing is just velcro’d on. In fact, you can peel the padding off the velcro at the bottom and sides, shove some crap in between chassis and padding until it touches your face. I tried this with some dense foam I cut but I’m not sure if it’s needed unless you are trying to block out lighting from behind you. The foam didn’t fall out either, and if it did, I could just put some velcro tape on the foam insert.
- One thing about it not touching most of my face is air flow; winter is apparently eliminated where I live now and it’s always on fire. I need to have a fan on for any VR and I could feel some fresh air getting in there.
- For the people wishing the HMD could swing down closer to your face, I don’t think that’s answer. Trying pressing it into your face, you’ll see the vertical edge of the displays. It seems to sit about where it’s supposed to as far as distance from our eyeballs is concerned.
Audio
- Seems about about on par with the default rift earphones. Everyone raved about those and the Odyssey’s but I think they both are very lacking in bass. I have the rift earbuds and found those to be a lot better with bass and immersion.
- I haven’t found an equalizer or any setting to adjust the bass. The huey soundmod I’m using is pretty lackluster at the moment but was great on earbuds.
- The headphones articulate around a hinge maybe 40 degrees forward and 30 degrees aft.
- The headphones slide up and down vertically on a track, they don’t go as low as the rift.
Visual
- Sweet spot is probably on par with the rift but outside of that a distortion similar to looking out a curved window that begins and gets greater towards the edges. This isn’t a big deal, but one thing I used to do with the rift in the Huey was watch the Torque, N1, & EGT at the bottom of the screen without looking directly at them. I could user peripheral vision while pulling pitch to see when the needles were approaching limits. I can still do this but it’s a little harder and I sometimes found myself nodding down a bit to see those 3 gauges better. It’s possible this effect appears more prominent but is equal due to an increased vertical FoV compared to the rift. That said I still feel like I can’t move my eyeballs around within a fixed head position and have as uniform of visual acuity without distortion compare to the rift. I’m not sure if that is making sense but I’m not talking about the sweet spot per se, which I consider to be more related to tolerance of HMD position on your head vs acuity.
- Screen Door Effect - didn’t really notice it and forgot to look for it. As many have said the filter is trading softness for less SDE. I would just add that the softness was not apparent to me in the cockpit or for objects/ground within about a 50ft radius of the UH1 hovering or on the ramp. It does become apparent in the distance but I prefer it to SDE.
- Sharpness/Detail - I need to fly some more aircraft but it’s better. I can now read and set the Directional Gyro in the Huey without using VR Zoom or leaning in, I still can’t quite make out a lot of smaller engine instruments without leaning in though.
- On dark cockpits like the Huey, I’m noticing some godrays surround the instruments that I didn’t notice before.
- Smoothness seems fine without Oculus ASW. I actually had a hard time turning that off with rift and I’m pretty sure it was causing frequent stutters in DCS. I didn’t notice any stuttering, but when I did get into low FPS it was like what you’d expect on a 2d monitor, it just doesn’t make me sick for some reason.
Tracking
- So much better on the O+. I have constant problems with the rift and I have 3 sensors. I’ve never had a flying session where something didn’t go wrong with the rifts tracking. I was getting so fed up trying to change USB ports, restart the Oculus service, reset position etc. The Odyssey+ just works.
- I didn’t mess with the controllers that much but they tracked fine. They may be a little delayed or software smoothed compared to the rift.
- My HMD cable is between 10’ -12’ feet, cant say the same for the rift, which I had to buy extensions for and another cause of reliability problems. I walked around a little bit and it worked fine.
Software
- I was really surprised at how well the Windows Mixed software works with Windows (yes, really) and steam after installing the utility from the steam store. So far I would say it’s a lot better suited at switching between VR and desktop apps than the rift. I really don’t understand how Microsoft did this right but foul everything else up lately.
- Setup was easy, just did what it told me to do and it found everything.
- There is a guardian boundary type system if you choose the full room setup, which you should, otherwise it wont let the headset traverse across X, Y, or Z it just rotates. You can turn the boundary off in the Windows MR settings.
So I’m keeping it, I’m sure I voided the warranty within 30 minutes anyway but I always seem to do that. Any fitting or light leaking issues I know I can solve by fabricating some foam chunks and sliding them under the mask padding. The hassle free tracking is one my favorite parts. The visuals are better but I’ll add more about that as I try more sims, games, & applications. If I could change 1 thing right now it would be the audio, I’ve got to find a way to get some more bass.