Samsung Odyssey & Odyssey Plus News

A three week delay to torture us waiting for new WidmoVR insets? :wink:

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I was happy with my regular 2D simming, a proud owner of a new 1440p widescreen, but you guys come and make me want to spend more money yet again.

I remember trying some VR early enough in the product cycle not to bother. Despite some occasional praise from some of you and some VTOLVR envy from Beach’s great posts. I was pretty much happy with TrackIR (me being new to the Flightsim world, it already seemed revolutionary only months ago).

Now this release got me looking into some of the old posts from 2016 and you all made really compelling arguments. Today, 2 years later I can see that it wasn’t just hype, that flying in VR must be this good, and with this new relatively hassle free system in WMR you all got me pretty tempted.

I have tried the Oculus before in elite dangerous for about 10 minutes and it was fun, but the image quality made all the more concentrated tasks, such as learning the game’s systems or dealing with Elite’s menu trees (and supposedly flight simulator cockpits), kind of counterproductive. The potential was there, sure, but it wasn’t an environment where I felt I could concentrate. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t give it enough time. Now with some minor upgrades in image, and the fact I can just buy some solution from a big company and use windows’s own VR software interface, makes it seem a lot less like a crazy experiment.

I guess I know what I’m getting for Christmas. That along with the maturing of the F18 and the release of the Tomcat is making this holiday season look more and more like an inflection point for me… It just seems like a much better time to jump in.

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Question - is this upgrade notably better than Vive Pro? I’m assuming it is since everyone is very excited :blush:

I think most people are describing it as a “diagonal” move from the Rift at least. I’m not sure how it would compare to a Vive. With so much reading I’ve done of other impressions this week, I’m really excited to put my own eyeballs in the thing and do a direct comparison with my Rift.

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@BeachAV8R @taubkin @Bearhedge

The resolution of the Odyssey+ is the same as the Odyssey and Vive Pro, the only major improvement is that the individual pixels (screen door) are not as visible.

For me, the Rift and Vive CV1 were just a bit too low on resolution to be enjoyable for flight Sims. Sure you could make it work with some supersampling, but GPUs are expensive and I thought " if I am going to pay for rendering all those pixels, I’d like to have them physically too"

The Odyssey has about 1.6 times the number of pixels of the Rift, which is exactly what I wanted. This is the same amount of pixels as Rift CV1 are rendering when they use SS=1.6 and good enough to make cockpits a lot more readable.
Also I thought I read that the Vive Pro used exactly the same panel as the Odyssey.

This Odyssey Plus just combines it with some small improvements to comfort and controllers, and the only major thing is the anti-SDE on the display.

Which apparently caused it to be picked up by the mainstream much better

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:vr:

I think a few of us were waiting to see what Oculus would do @Freak, in that if to jump from the Rift to a full Rift 2 with things like varifocal displays and eye tracking for foveated rendering to reduce the hardware requirements for much higher resolution panels (or panels with mixed resolutions with higher PPI in the center etc) and the like would happen in the next year or not. Obviously it looks like it is going to be longer out now, i.e. 2021, 2022 etc.

After the recent OC5 dev conference and the messages given out there was why the SO was worth another look as an interim upgrade to existing Rift owners. The SO+ timing and the claims of more readable text etc with the anti-SDE was just sort of coincidence of timing.

The SO was always better than the Rift for sim stuff I feel, it just came out when a lot of us already had a Rift already, and that’s a harder upgrade to justify compared to just having no VR.

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That makes sense.

Funny, I don’t really think too much about SDE and comfort when using my SO. I do think a lot more about the poor resolution while flight simming, god rays, and small sweet spot. Are they better than the CV1? Undoubtably. Brighter, a little sharper, with less SDE. I also find them comfortable.

But really, I think that we all expectected better resolution by now. The Oculus was so revolutionary and compelling when we first tried it, the fact that it took what, five years to come to market, escaped us.

@fearlessfrog is really on to something when he says that it will probably take someone like Apple to drive the market. Although, we can definitely be thankful that Samsung is in the game. For that reason, we should all go buy the SO+ like gangbusters to reward them for their effort, even if it does feel like something of a shell game. Wait, I’m thinking of HTC.

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I think wherever Iribe ends up is where the PC crowd will eventually follow. I don’t think he is done with VR yet and we might see a new company out of this. Oculus is done to me for at least a couple years, they would have announced this Rift 1.5 thing at Oculus Connect if they cared. Anything they say after Oculus Connect is just damage control. My CV1 isn’t good enough for me to use for another 2-3 years and I don’t want to wait another 6 months or year for their 1.5 Rift. Moving to Vive Pro or Pimax costs way too much so the best option is the Odyssey+ to hold me over until the next generation. I think Samsung didn’t plan for this and are probably caught by surprise with the sudden interest in their headset. They’re probably wishing they had spent more R&D into comfort but I bet they’re re-evaluating how important VR is to them now.

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Another review in: Samsung Odyssey+: Early Impressions – 10ThousandEyes

I know I did.
But I guess we all got that from how monitor development worked. They have had a long development cycle of bigger and better screens.

But increasing the resolution of VR headsets seems to be different. They all had, more or less, maxed out resolution from the get go. We simply don’t have the power to run any higher resolution. So either CPU and GPU developers need to get creative. Or VR need new tech, like eye tracking and selective rendering techniques.
Until then, all we get are slightly better screens, like the ones we see in VR 1.5 headsets like Vive Pro and SO(+) and probably the next Oculus offering.

Hey, just a thing… If anyone is not that happy anymore with their Oculus, I’ll gladly offer to take it off their hands for a fair price. :smiley:

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Another real nice user review…

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I see some people are complaining about comfort.
It must be hard for VR developers to get this right, without making it too cumbersome.
The light pollution issue can’t be that hard to fix?
Gimme a roll of ductape! :wink:

The screens get a lot of attention. Seems like users agree that the new screen makes it worth the investment.

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If there is light leakage then maybe there is a nose gap similar to that on the Rift. I see that as an advantage as it allows you to peek down at the keyboard if you need to.

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There is no nose gap
Afor the Odyssey 1, light is coming mostly from the sides on my head

EDIT: Oh yeah, the O+ had changed the nose guards so don’t extrapolate

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In the Odyssey Plus it looks like they redesigned and removed the nose ‘blinder’ things. Plus no more ‘pleather’ cushions. I wonder how many of these comfort things could be solved by a 3rd party seat plate or something. I’ve read that people can use things like a Rift removable cushion on the Plus and it works ok.

Good comparison on design changes here (click through for compare tool, with Plus on right):

I think my head is all normal shaped, but I guess we’ll have to see. :slight_smile:

Yes, I’m seeing some references in those reviews to a third party vendor that must sell some sort of padding or comfort kit. I’ll be interested to see what kinds of “mods” we see given all of the complaining (I’m still hoping I’m the Samsung protoypical user)…

The irony about the SO1 nose grommet is that all you have to do is fold the flaps up inside the gaps along the edge and the fit becomes about perfect. But the little gap that the CV1 has is actually nice to peek at the keyboard as someone has already mentioned.

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Another more critical review of the + where the reviewer is electing to return the +…for the issues we’ve been hearing about for the past week: