because english is not my native language, i try to leave this review as short as possible.
At First: My headset dont have any of the hardware related issues many others have. Very glad about that! I even could extend the Display Port Cable with a 5m extension cable without any issues. USB extension cable is also working but i have crackling audio noises, so i think a active usb hub can help here. Will test this today.
Setting up the headest over pitool was easy. Everything works on the first try. But i have to say, that i had to restart pitool, steamvr and sometimes my pc multiple times while using the headset, because the controllers switched from state “ready” to “not tracked”. Most of the times after quitting games. Tracking also get choppy here and there after quitting games and i need to restart things to solve it. There are definitly more improvements to do for pimax in terms of stability.
My first impressions of the visuals: I find the distortion in the edges and the overlapping lense-borders in your vision VERY annoying. The lense-borders seems to go away after time, similar to borders from glasses or your nose, but the distortions my brain never could compensate. Even with small FOV it´s clearly visible. So i do the double face cover thingy and after that, distortions are nearly gone for the cost of a smaller FOV :(. Here we need better face covers from pimax and i hope pimax could do some distortions improvements with better pitool profiles.
While playing i had the feeling that looking through the pimax is very exhausting for my eyes. Cant even say why, because everything looks clear and even with the gearvrmod i used in my vive i didnt have this problem. I think it is because the world moves with you while you turning your head and i tried nearly every headset-position and IPD and cant get rid of this. Will see if i get used to this.
Comfortwise it´s a mess with the standard strap. Vive DAS helps a alot. And in my opinion the pimax needs some sort of nose flaps to prevent incoming light.
Brainwarp - Pimax did a good job here. Its better then Motion Smoothing from Valve. You also can see when its activated but its way more acceptable than i had expected. Nice!
Overall i find the display-sharpness the most impressiv - more then the FOV.
There are many compromises i have to do in comparison to my vive and i hope Pimax will get my way to go headset.
I tried nearly any position…and i am using normal fov in pitool. And the distortions in the edges is way more heavy then a fisheye effect. I think the reason why the double face cover mod helps is because the outer edges get out of your vision.
I installed the latest 103 beta from heliosurges googledrive.
I tried a thicker 18mm cushion too yesterday and it helped to make the fresnel rings less visible but it took away the outer edges or the large view. The new outer edges were horribly fuzzy though, they looked way better when I was closer to the screen. Looks like everything is a trade off
Hello, thanks for the review. I think we have quite exactly the same experience, except that the most annoying part is what you call overlapping lense-borders for me.
I feel a bit better if you say you got used to it, I did not have time to try myself.
I think the problem is that the big FOV make us want to move our eyes, but doing so make distortions and the overlapping zone to pop out in the vision.
I am not at the end of the road with testing different setups. I can imagine that going further away from the lenses with double face cover, the overlapping area of the lenses get bigger and more in front of your vision. The more you are closer to the lenses the more the borders move in between your eyes to the area where the nose is and then it is way more acceptable (i think). Also can i imagine that the world moving thing also gets more heavy because you got out of the focus the pimax is designed for. Maybe you have to be as close to the lenses as you are with the standard face cover. But then there is the thing with the visibile distortions in the edges. I hope i can find the sweet spot between all those things for me and i hope that future pitool versions brings improvements to this.
Exactly, but this renders the more FOV thing almost useless. The whole angled part gets completely blurred but it helps with the fisheye effect in the middle. I tried with no facepad at all and 2mm less than my actual IPD which is very uncomfortable(eye lashes touch screen, heavy on the nose) but seems to deliver best results.
Out of curiousity, have u tried that as well?
Haha no I haven’t tried that yet. But also because I have a pretty large nose and my eyes are further away. Will have a go tonight.
It seems the headset is prodominantly designed for Asian face types, who have almost no nose ridge at all. They made the nose hole bigger for westeners but the lenses are still made for the closeness of Asian faces it seems
I tried 18mm yesterday and am quite happy with the result. I would even like to test 20mm.
I still have correct edges in terms of blurriness and the distortions are better. It is also helping with my glasses.
I also tried with no facepad but distortions are really worse, I guess because of my IPD (70).
The post was edited after upgrading my GPU to an RTX 2080 and most of all, after updating pitool to a more recent version (which changed lots of the distorsion I experienced).
I tried to lift it up a little, but then, you have a big gap around the nose with light entering and the lower foam resting on the cheekbone (instead of just below) is then uncomfortable. Contrary to the Vive, you don’t have a thin plastic layer to fill the gap without hurting.
As for the IPD, You make me remember that the dialing is quite bad. My IPD is 64, so I roll it one way : 63,7 … 63,8 … nothing … nothing … nothing … 64,3. So I roll it the other way : 64,2 … 64,1 … nothing … nothing … 63,7. I don’t know why, but sometimes, the exact values stop being displayed, and you have to retry several times to reach the exact value.
As said in the message (albeit not at the beginning), this is the 5K.
you shouldn’t rely on your measured IPD. You should instead use the image in the link to set it (Pimax IPD is usually shorter then measured IPD). When all lines are not blurred you’ll know you have the right setting. Distortions and eye-strain should be greatly reduced too, to the point of both being a non issue, at least with normal FOV. This is mine and many others’ experience. https://community.openmr.ai/t/pimax-official-1-0-1-103-beta-test-release-for-brainwarp-1-0/14256/537