Varjo Aero VR headset

Excellent post @Troll ! :+1:

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Glad you wrote that out. Interesting stuff and I’m glad you made peace with it.
We all have stuff we might of paid too much money for, but as long as you are happy with it and your decisions then the paper won’t be chasing you.
I once went out for a bacon roll on my motorbike and came home without it but riding an 848 ducati. I hated it from the minute I bought it. Uncomfortable, slow, quiet, twitchy. It sat in the garage most of that summer and I sold it before winter. I never made my peace with the purchase and it bugged me the whole time I owned it.

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Happy to hear you’ve made your decision,It really does sound like a great piece of gear.
Like You,I really Love The VR Flight Sim Experience……Not sure if I’d be so into DCS without it.

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Similar review here

At 13:58 he makes a good point I don’t recall mentioned here (@Troll perhaps did): “future proofing” - foveated rendering is already there, just need a sim that supports it. Interesting in that he claims it was “quite comfortable”. Sounds like it is perhaps not adjustable enough?

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I don’t remember if we discussed it in this thread, or in the VR news thread perhaps, but I’ve had the online interactive @fearlessfrog encyclopedia explain this to me, at some point…
But yeah, it is an interesting feature. If it works as well as I hope, I guess we’ll see it in more headsets in the future. I think Pimax has an optional eyetracker for their headsets…?

I thought it would extremely adjustable, considering the two straps and tilt function… And I had a very comfortable experience with the halo strap of the Rift S. Unfortunately I think it’s the facial interface that is the problem here. It would probably fit a flatter face better. I have space available at the temples and all the pressure is focused on the cheekbones, below the eyes, and the eyebrows…
I’m looking at ways to modify this.

Speaking of modding…
The sound, or lack thereof, needs attention.
I managed to find my old RiftS headphones, that I modded in this thread and made some adjustments for the Aero. Bad sound in VR headsets is nothing new. No sound, though, in a $2K VR headset…! :roll_eyes:
Unfortunately, Varjo seems to hate sound. Is it that they love the peace and tranquility of the deep dark forests, so much…?
There’s no good place to add headphones. I used the old 3D printed rails that I made for the RiftS, added a distance and taped them to the halo strap. It will have to do until I can design new ones.


The sound of these Sennheisers was great for the RiftS, but coming from the Valve designed speakers of the G2, they sound absolutely anemic.

Do I really have to use a complete audio headset, with over ear cups…?
I must see if there are alternatives available.

The way Varjo designed the facial interface means I can’t use the VR cover…cover. I made an internal cover out of neoprene.

Varjo, if you’re listening. This is the kind of stuff you could’ve thrown in with the Aero. Perhaps a nifty little protective bag as well? Would’ve made us users feel better about our investment. Yeah, we’re really that gullible :wink:

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Hi! To find out what I can do, say @fearlessfrog display help . :robot:

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Come to think of it, nobody has ever seen fearlessfrog and discobot together… :thinking:

@fearlessfrog, are you in fact discobot?

Tell the truth now,

@discobot fortune

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:crystal_ball: Outlook not so good

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Ok, so you’re probably not a bot after all, just very clever… :wink:

So, while I have your attention, I thought I’d try some NIS/FSR upscaling with the Aero… DCS Pixel density 1.0 and SteamVR at…100%?

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Yes, those determine the number of pixels you see. Not sure how much oversampled SteamVR 100% is on the Varjo (it was heavily oversampled for the Reverb G2) but that should be a lot of pixels.

For NIS or FSR upscaling, you then decide in its own config (yml?) what fraction of those pixels you want the game to render normally: usually between 0.6 and 0.9, meaning 60% to 90% of the pixels you see in the end. The discrepancy between those is fixed with the upscaling algorithm, which should be a lot cheaper than rendering the full 100% in the game.

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Wouldn’t the bot or @fearlessfrog be smart enough to program a bot to answer that in the way they wanted?

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Damn… :man_facepalming:

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Take a look at this TTL video that I made…

I couldn’t understand why I got these grey-outs in the Aero… It had happened once or twice, but now it seemed to correlate with throttle position, in and out of afterburner, in DCS Hornet.
I recorded this and was about to come here crying all about it, but then my brain engaged! It may have been affected by Covid? My brain, not the Aero.,

I remembered that I just tried to increase the height in the base station, that I mounted on top of the lid of my SimBox.
As the tracking seems to pause in the grey-outs, maybe it’s associated to the base station…?
Looking at the base station, moving the throttle back and forth, I could see the green light go from green to blue and back to green.
It turns out that moving the throttle through the detents creates a vibration through the sidewall of the SimBox, that resonates through to the base station and throws it out of whack for a moment…
Luckily, the base station doesn’t have to be centered, or even close to the headset, so I put it on the wall, and all was good!

Correlation does not imply causation :wink:

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yup, can confirm, mounting on a wall is the perfect solution as the thing vibrates on its own.

and as you mentioned the distance, my man cave is not that big and I had actually problem to place it far enough from the goggles.

and one more thing, I have read that some people had also problem with reflections from other stuff like shiny surfaces.

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@Troll , something for you

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I caved in and got a pair of Valve VR controllers from a Norwegian scalper. Valve doesn’t sell their VR products in Norway, so the only option is to order via friends in countries that they do business in. Naturally, scalpers take advantage of this and I couldn’t be bothered with that right now.
Anyway, here they are!



Did a quick test in VTOL VR and they are really nice! There’s a lot to like about that VR sim and while you certainly don’t need the super clarity of the Aero headset to have fun in VTOL VR, the image just pops out at you, sharp as a razor!

SteamVR tells me the controllers need updating, but when I try, SteamVR crashes… I guess I need to do some research.

Edit. Got a tip on the Varjo users Discord channel about shutting down the Varjo Base software before updating the controllers and that worked!

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Trying to solve the missing audio issue… I bought a rather good on ear headset on sale. It’s the Swedish UrbanEars Plattan 2. They are wireless bluetooth headsets but also has a 3,5mm connector so I can plug them into the Aero. Forgot to take a picture of it, before slaughter, but here are the parts that I kept.

I bought them for the wireframe mounts, thinking it would be relatively easy to make adapters that fit the Aero halo frame.

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See…that is what separates an engineering mindset from an idiot like me. I would look at that and be like…man…I should do this tomorrow. And would say that for two months…

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Something like this, maybe…?

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