So looking at some utility type stuff. I went into Steam and tried out Virtual Desktop and it looks very impressive. I had dabbled with it in the Rift and O+, but never would have felt comfortable spending a long time in there. That has changed with the Reverb. I could see flipping back and forth and actually doing some productivity stuff on Virtual Desktop given the clarity and sharpness of the text. These screens don’t quite do it justice…again, a lot clearer when you are actually in the headset. I fiddled with the distance, curve, and other settings and found a perfect setting for me that provided great distance/clarity/and usability of the screen. I found I had to dim the screen brightness in Virtual Desktop to about 70% to provide an easier viewing environment. Perhaps my background wallpaper contrast is too high.
You can also watch 360 degree movies in Virtual Desktop. I just sampled some from YouTube. You select the URL, it downloads, and then plays. Watching Free Solo in 360 is appropriately terrifying.
Colors are good and I’m guessing resolution depends on the uploaded video resolution and YouTube settings.
Next I tried Big Screen in SteamVR. Always a creepy experience. Nothing like sitting in a virtual movie theater with strangers and having one of them teleport into a seat next to you and start saying “F-You” to you in English with a Japanese accent. Awesome. Some guy was showing American Pie 2. I could totally see watching films this way…it feels like a real movie theater (for better or worse). Resolution of the film looked OK, but I think that has more to do with the person hosting the room and the quality of their original content and perhaps their streaming ability? I’d be interested to see a high quality offering from Big Screen themselves (apparently they have events on occasion).
I joined another room and a group of guys was chatting as they experimented with the screen settings. They were playing segments of Avatar, and at one point they had the screen in 3D mode (watching a 3D movie in 3D…mind blown) and it looked quite good actually. And it was actually 3D like you’d see at the movie theater, with some stuff sort of floating off the screen. Avatar was probably one of the best films for this type of movie. Again, I’d like to see it in a higher resolution stream if possible.
Question:
When you played DCS or other flight sims, did you have to lean forward to read instruments?
Specific examples in DCSW: the numbers on the ADF of the MiG-21 or the airspeed gauge in the F-14, or the temperature gauge of the Mustang.
Ok, I admit those are so small, probably people lean in to read them in real life as well…
What about the HUDs? Are the small letters (Hornet or Warthog lower right corner) readable without zoom?
Anyway in the video with labels…you can see vehicle dots at 2.3 nm… Heck, I have a hard time finding them on a 2D monitor let alone VR, but this is an improvement over the O+ and Rift. Will see what I see with regards to air-to-air targets…
I hesitate to post these, because they are pretty crap quality. This is achieved (poorly I might add) by flying a quick segment in DCS, then playing back the replay and then me holding my headset in one hand, holding my GoPro jammed up in the left eyepiece (taking care not to scratch the lenses together) and then me twisting around in my seat to try to approximate what the head would be doing. As a result, you get a fairly good FOV, but really bad lighting and clarity compared to the in-headset image.
But for reference…and you can’t tell it here in this video, I could see the dot of the Su-27 at over 9nm…and he sort of stays that way until 1.7nm or so when he starts to take shape. I think you’d be hard presssed to ID him as an Su-27 until probably .7nm with regards to a head on pass. Once you get into turning and start seeing the full planform, he is much more readily identifiable at 2nm or so. Second still image tries to show a bit of that, but is still way blurrier than what you see in the headset…
Also note that the GoPro actually goes the other way with regards to field of view…giving TOO much FOV and presenting that fish-eye look. Ideally you’d have a camera that had a FOV that perfectly matched the headset FOV. Any-who, don’t know if these are more or less useful…probably just confusing people…LOL…
As the sun gets higher outside my pics will have more light artifacts since I will get some reflections off the windows in my house. So sorry about that.
So for those curious. I can see the ball at 2nm, but it would be hard to judge vertical position until around 1nm when it starts to firm up a bit. VTOL VR has spoiled me for a really visible ball unfortunately. But inside of a mile it works and was good enough for a 3-wire in my first landing in months…
In the controls menu you can map a button on your HOTAS to VR zoom. (I think it’s under UI interface or something similar) It’s like using the slider on the warthog throttle when using track ir, but way less powerful and only is off or on unlike the slider which offers gradients of zoom.
I just meant reprojection. I think the resolution / super sampling percentage value is probably the only setting from SteamVR that is read, everything else is probably on the Windows WMR side of things.
It seems the best ‘tuning’ algorithm for WMR and using reprojection would be:
Go to the default.vsettings file and comment out (using //) the motion line, i.e. turn it OFF.
Test DCS with your settings. Adjust them so you get to 55 to 60 fps with the resolution / super sampling you want.
Go back to default.vrsettings and uncomment the line (remove the //) so it says “motionReprojectionMode” : “auto”, in there.
That way you’ll get smooth tree sideways and reprojection working properly. The things I didn’t realize before were:
WMR always has some form of motion reprojection on, it’s just the simpler ‘rotational’ type (where looking sideways causes judders for example) if it can’t make some headroom over 45 fps (it seems typically you need 55 to 60 fps to be safe).
The fancy ‘motion vector’ reprojection is very good, but needs to be turned on in that file. Once on then you’re only ever going to see either 45 or 90 in the fps read-out. Turning it off is useful to adjust detail settings.
WMR is like archaeology on how it works underneath. I half expect to find a stick of a certain length that’s going to refract the sun’s rays over a temple map through a jewel, so we can find out how to do nicer anti aliasing one day…
23.2 ms on the GPU bottleneck side is quite a while for a frame timing. The ‘you can get to 90 fps’ is under 11 ms (which I know is not the goal here, just about 55-60 fps).
If you have MSAA set or full shadows it might be worth tweaking them down a bit? Basically a couple of the settings are logarithmic with resolution, so they have a disproportionate impact for the poor GPU. Reprojection on ‘auto’ is comfy with a GPU frametime of about 18 ms or so (i.e. no red on the graph of thrown away frames).
Well? You’ve had it for almost one whole day now. Are you ready to unequivocally promote it as the headset to get for us simmers? If you do, I’ll order the minute they get back in the shop…
Kind of a hard valuation to make to be honest - because it is significantly more expensive than some others. Also, like @fearlessfrog has mentioned, it uses WMR, which sometimes requires some tinkering to get the maximum from the headset. And Microsoft occasionally breaks things on updating, so there’s that too.
The only two things that I would really like to have seen improved are the controllers (I wonder if I can pair my O+ controllers to it?) and the cable…which I saw described as an I-beam on Reddit…which is about right. The thing feels like it could carry enough power to run a house.
Oh…and I’m 68 IPD and it feels fine to me…but an adjustable IPD would have been welcomed too.
No. Not at all. LOL. Unless it breaks. This headset was essentially what I ordered my new PC for…so I’m happy I didn’t get one of the “off” units. Which means I probably have a Rift CV1 going up for sale or a prize or something at some point since now the hand-me-down is going to be the O+ to other family members. Although we have an adopted-ish nephew that lives with us, so we might actually have a need at some point for three HMDs.
Of course, I held off for an entire year on getting them Fortnite on their Switch. They begged for it for the entire year and I said no. And they got such good grades and did so well on their final testing that I said OK. I haven’t seen them in 4 days. I think they might still be alive up there.
