Ok… I just winged it. 
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I thought this was interesting. (shamelessly stolen from ED forum here)
If WMR tracking wasn’t so bad this would be a closer race. It really depends on if you’re a HOTAS user or not. I personally love X-Plane with hand controllers enough to worry quite a bit about HP WMR. While the Samsung O+ is ‘acceptable’ for tracking, it would have been nicer for that $600 to have an upgrade in that department too.
Those Valve Index new weird lenses and that super high persistence panel cause pause for thought as well.
Denny Unger, lead of Cloudhead, who’s had all the units for a while:
There’s so much I cannot say but I need to say one thing here. I have A/B’d these devices side-by-side for the last few months. So many people are underestimating what the Index does differently and does so well. It is almost not a comparable experience. Take that for what its worth until you try it for yourselves.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/bj9ypg/to_anyone_complaining_about_the_display/em7bm22/
Man alive. So many variables. 
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Yeah!
Like that XTAL video. Same res as the Pimax, but better lenses and screen utilization makes it a better experience.
And, the VR experience is almost impossible to describe in the first place. You can never know if this or that headset is the best choice for you. Unless you get to play with all of them.
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My big variable is the upcoming DCS vr optimisation . Absent that , i need to upgrade cpu and gpu (over the course of the next year) . But i don’t know if the optimisation unloads one , the other or both .
This in turn effects headset upgrade . I could prolly handle the Rift S now with some compromise , but the Index is possible with the optimisation . I sure would feel foolish though , upgrading the gpu , only to find the optimisation would unload my existing one , and the same for a new cpu/motherboard/cooler .
(Sigh) guess the best thing to do is wait for the optimisation , and use the interim reading headset reviews by Dcs players . But I’m kinda feeling like ED is holding me hostage
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And then there’s the Vulkan API change…
If you wait long enough, someone may release a headset with foveated rendering and there will be another optimization.
Not trying to discourage you.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
There’s always a next corner.
It’s always prudent to wait and see, and make the change when you know what you will get.
But, the way things work in this business, there’s no guarantee that you won’t regret your decision in six months.
C’est la vie.
I got nailed by a price drop on the rift like 3 weeks after I bought it I mean I was still thrilled to have it but the $200 I could’ve saved… Lol.
Never a good time to jump, as Troll says.
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Has anyone looked at/compared the weights of all 3 of the new sets? (Rift S, Index and Reflex) I only ask as I originally purchased a Vive and on a whim purchased the Rift and quickly realized just how much more comfortable the Rift was to wear longer term because it was so much lighter.
A quick search gives:
Rift S 563g
HP Reverb 500g.
Couldn’t find a weight for the Index.
The Rift S has a halo which, I’m guessing, weighs more than the head bands of the Reverb. So The weight of the display units is probably similar…
I would believe that the way the halo/band/strap attach to your noggin, is probably more important to the over all comfort. And here’s where I think the Reverb will be the winner, as it has a very similar setup as the OG Rift. I am glad they put the top center band on the halo of the Rift S though. That should improve the comfort.
But then it also comes down to the shape of your head, and personal preference.
Actually , that is very similar to the advice i generally give In this case , as it impacts headset upgrade choice , i’m gonna wait .
In any event it doesn’t sound like it will be much longer as Nineline indicates that ALL maps are currently in internal testing . With luck , the optimisation will come roughly at the same time as headset reviews , so i’m feeling much better 
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Yeah, I’m really interested in that performance increase. I imagine that it’s hardware dependent. Some CPU/RAM/GPU combos will probably see a bigger increase than others. Wags eyeballes roughly 50% increase, and he’s got a rather high performance PC, from what I remember.
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A brief overview of the Rift S. That passthrough feature looks like it could be usefull. Wonder if it somehow can be bound to a HOTAS button…
Oculus Rift S Setup, Unboxing & Tips
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Good dual review of Rift S and HP Reverb from Ars Technica
Some strong opinions on the Rift S:
Get this system down to $250, Oculus, and you’ll have a no-brainer add-on for any older gaming PC. Otherwise, the cheapness and trade-offs are a bit too severe for anybody willing to swallow down Windows Mixed Reality’s limitations (mostly with hand-tracking) and consider another option: the comfortable, high-res, OLED-fueled Samsung Odyssey, currently selling in the $400-ish price range as a complete kit.
Not sure I completely agree with that, as I’m not 100% convinced the O+ is a worthwhile upgrade over the Rift for $400, especially since the shape of head / fit plus the WMR stuff is worth the compromise. Still @PaulRix does have one for sale less than $300 here so possible bargain if it works for you.
HP Reverb gets a similarly critical review for general rather than just sim’ing VR:
On the other end of the spectrum, I really want to like the HP Reverb, but it mostly confirms my suspicions that such a high VR resolution at such a low price really is too good to be true. Anybody looking to get a fleet of enterprise-caliber headsets should certainly put a Reverb on and see if their specific use case fits into its compromises—because, truly, I think some VR use cases are perfect candidates for Reverb’s compromises. That’s a lot of value on a high-resolution basis alone. But I just can’t suggest the Reverb as an across-the-board VR headset—especially just one month before the launch of the LCD-fueled, 120Hz Valve Index.
Looks a definite ‘try before you buy’ or ‘buy from where you can send back’ set of red flags all over that.
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I got the inpression that the reviewer didn’t want to like either of the headsets…?
Almost as if he is comparing them to what he thinks a VR headset should be, or what he hopes the Index will be.
Don’t know. I get a strange vibe…
I mean, of course both headsets will have their limitations…
Still the best advice when it comes to anything VR.
Easier said than done, in some parts of the world, but definitely the way to do it, if possible.
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The Valve Index is still under review NDA, so he might have reviewed it but is sort of talking in this strange way because they can’t wait to get a Rift S and HP R review out.
I agree there was an odd vibe, in that he talked about pro color profiles and lots of tech details, but then didn’t put much weight to the extra cameras and better tracking of the Rift S. Inconsistent is what it felt like.
It was a bit infuriating to see his complete disregard for flight and drive VR sims as well, in that he wrote stuff like this:
Reverb’s “sweet spot” visibility, in the center of a user’s field of vision (FOV), is the absolute winner in its price sector. After roughly one week of Reverb testing, I’m now convinced that this is the pixel count to count as “good enough” if you want to guarantee unobtrusive small-text legibility for the sake of VR’s research, education, and industrial design apps. (In Reverb’s case, this selling point is buoyed by the LCD panels’ dense subpixel resolution and 90Hz refresh.)
…and I’m shouting ‘Hey, what about the sims!!’. I know we are a niche within a niche but a lot of high-end GPU’s and VR stuff is bought by us VR sim people, he could have at least acknowledged this, or commented on it.
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No, you’re just going to have to delid that i5 ASAP and shoot your own video: “Sims & VR with Frog: An Edutainment Series” about all the various considerations an potentials of each headset to suit them. Brought to you in part by MudSpike.com
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Ah…! That could very well be the reason.
Yes!
The PC game genre that benefits most from VR, are simulations! Maybe I’m biased, but when I dreamed about VR headsets, I dreamed about flightsims, not Luckys Tale…
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Yeah…it was an interesting review to read if not wholly satisfying. I get a little frustrated by the comments about peripheral vision blurriness simply because I’m not sure that there is any solution to that without foveated rendering. I mean, as an experiment, just look at this webpage on a monitor and realize your eyes are moving constantly to read…so in VR it only make sense that everything outside of that that your eyes aren’t immediately centered on is going to be slightly blurry. In VR, for the current batch of technology, we are sort of going to have to accept that we are going to have to move our heads a little. It becomes natural very quickly of course.
I’d love the ability to move my eyes faster than my head (“his eye’s darted around the cockpit as he tried to identify the source of the smoke…”) but that is just going to be down the road at this point.
I dunno. It has been my experience that two different people will have wildly varying opinions on the same hardware, so all of these impressions are interesting, but I remind myself that people and their expectations are different.
It will be interesting to see how sales go as we are at an interesting crossroad where multiple techs are coming out nearly simultaneously, but not exactly simultaneously, so there might be this weird trend of a large chunk of people not buying anything for a bit until the whole circus is revealed. And then you have impatient gits like me that want the next wave so badly that we’ll gamble a bit on a good experience (as long as I can return it).
Fun stuff watching this all shake out though. Gonna go watch that MRTV Reverb video now…
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Dont know if this qualifies as news exactly, but this statistics page at Oculus is new to me atleast, and I found it quite interesting, if not especially usefull.
Apparantly most users are on a GTX 1060 card (17%) and only around 3% on a 2080, while 1080 is 14%
Oculus hardware report
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Probably the nearest review we’re going to get for flight sims that a lot of us use here:
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After testing the Rift S I’m left with a feeling that I’d like to combine the best features of the Rift CV1 and the S…and the Reverb seems to come very close to fulfilling this wish and exceeding it…
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