Our Samsung Odyssey (+) first impressions, tips, and tricks...

Graphic’s engine dependent. Source, Unity and Unreal can do it on the fly. Stuff we use, assume the worse and restart. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Ok, wife entered room, sees me wearing baseball cap on backwards PLUS VR unit, makes a sort of sad sigh noise, but comes back in later with these babies:

Ski head-bands. Hello from Lake Tahoe California everyone!

Works amazingly well. This is comfort strap Frog Ti.

6 Likes

Sweet…because I tried your backwards baseball cap and I could no longer howl at the moon with the brim clocking me between my shoulder blades.

1 Like

So I did experiment with this just now. Steam VR is recommending something like 182%. I set the slider at that and P3D looks good and performs well. This was the setting where the Aerosoft Airbus is just barely not quite sharp enough to make out things like the flight director panel range settings on the rotary dial. That is the knob I’m sort of using as the baseline (I think it has 20, 40, 60, 80 markings or something).

Bumped the PD down to 20% and it was, as expected, a blurry mess.

Bumped it to 300% and noticed no real improvement in readability, but a decrease in performance.

Bumped it to 500% and noticed no improvement in readability, but a big decrease in performance.

I restarted the sim each time I made the adjustment in Steam VR…so it does seem that I was at or near the limit of improvements via that method at the 180-200% area.

Messing with stuff in P3D - FXAA and MSAA are absolutely necessary to keep shimmering down to a minimum. They don’t really have all that big a hit on performance anyway…they just make the visuals better. I turned on HDR and things got way to bright, so I turned the brightness down to 40% or so on that slider, and it improved things…but basically made it look the same as HDR OFF, so I’m leaving that off.

Messing with V-Sync and in-game resolutions only changes the appearance on the monitor, not in the headset.

So I think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities and just have to accept that some planes with very fine resolution MFDs and stuff will require either some zoom or me leaning in.

1 Like

The shimmering could be caused by the fact that the graphics don’t really include high definition mip maps for any of the textures (fun fact: ‘mip’ is from the latin multum in parvo or much in little). These pre-computed level of detail info per texture helps with anti-aliasing without killing performance. Often they are missing meaning we get a lot of shimmering in old games in VR. The base level for the textures is probably not even 2k either. Does the Airbus have 4k textures?

1 Like

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.

8 Likes

Nice write-up Jeff - thanks!

1 Like

Really nice observations…! I laughed that you took a razor to it right off the bat. The Samsung engineers must have been some unique looking dudes…

5 Likes

I don’t know. Been looking around to see if anyone mentions anything about it, but can only see some old references to the product prior to the P3D v4 one that mentions a 4K replacement pack…

Very nice objective, informative and hilarious write up. Dare I say, designed in Japan the land of small noses. My girlfriend is Asian. On her birthday I gave her designer sunglasses . She said they were nice but “Dont touch my nose, only cheek”.
My nose would require the same brave procedure our Jeff has so bravely undertaken.
I spent 2 grand fixing cars and renewing registrations this month. I’m keeping my list in check… but keep talking fellas.

1 Like

Hmm…I seem to be having this same problem, but I restarted DCS and made sure Steam VR was showing the HMD and the two hand controllers, but I’m still not able to lean forward or side to side. Head tracking works in the yaw and pitch axis (looking up/down/left/right) but if I lean in, the whole pit leans with me…and same if I try to slide left or right…

Lemme try a reboot and try again…

1 Like

I think what I said didn’t help, in that @Freak doesn’t even use hand controllers. It’s the headset wanting to reset its position and redo the quick start-up.

The solution is to close the SteamVR window, put the HMD back on and let it do the ‘windows logo, blue screen look left/right’ thing to sort itself out. Once that is done, then you can start your SteamVR app as normal. The controllers were a placebo for me as I probably took the headset off to grab them and turn them on maybe.

I find for reliable start-up I boot-up, put the headset on, wait for the Windows Mixed Reality app to come up, then in my house I have really large Desktop app window shown and then I double click a desktop icon to start, i.e. the DCS icon, the X-Plane icon etc. That was seems to be 100% reliable.

1 Like

Yeah…I think that might have been it OR my room might have been too dim…but I think it was the initial calibration perhaps. Rebooting and going through the calibration, then activating Steam VR, then loading DCS did the trick.

I’m going to go ahead and ask a dumb question. How do you remove holograms from your Cliff House? I’m getting a little tired of seeing that damn gecko riding his bike around my pad.

shrug3

Are you still using the labels mod you talk about here?

I’m interested in going with something a little less obtrusive than the default…

Saw something that the O+ would be on sale for Black Friday at $299

Hover over it, and a black set of controls appears - the X cross deletes it:

https://www.vrheads.com/how-personalize-windows-mixed-reality-cliff-house

1 Like

Not intentionally :slight_smile:

It still works well, just a grey dot if you need it over a certain distance.

1 Like

Yep, in the news thread here - Samsung Odyssey & Odyssey Plus News - #269 by BeachAV8R. I’ll rename each topic to make this one more an ‘impressions and tips’ one and the other one news and stuff, as it is a bit confusing.

2 Likes

I need someone else to weigh in on this but I’m starting to think more and more that there is some kind of application based volume focusing going on. Try flying around in the huey while listening to music, I used Spotify, then hit ESC. It really seems like the music fades in louder (beyond the game sounds going away). I did install some equalizer program to try and get more bass so it might be that, but just wondering if anyone else is noticing weird variations in volume before I uninstall it?