Yeah needs to be £800 tops.
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BB looks like a perfect HMD for me, only thing that worries is reports about some lenses artifacts at the lenses borders. If sweetspot \ edge2edge \ chromattic abb will be bad it can spoil it, I believe this headset will make VR more popular, finally head bricks is a thing of past.
VR should be comfortable. If user can’t sit in a VR device even a working day thats useless. It’s not a way to make VR a mainstream product like phones. This device solves one of the most experience breaking fundamental problem of VR. Even if not solves but makes it cause minimal impact. Crystal with its principle & ideas put in it looks like a bad joke, even if visuals are good, device basically unusable, you can put a CRT monitor on your head & go to the office with the same success (for those who play 1-2 hrs in sims per day it maybe not that bad, but for an average user its awful). Finally somebody does something that matters for people that spent a lot of time in VR since it’s release. And they do almost all right. Very close. Best proposition on market for the last years.
Hope somebody from the wild will post some first impressions. Because real different ppl opinions are very interesting to read.
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I fully agree that the form factor is a big step forward and I‘m looking forward to what minimal shapes can be achieved thanks to pancake lenses and those tiny uOLED panels.
Even though I have close to no interest in an HMD without ET and in spite of the somewhat small FOV, I did preorder the BSB.
But when it was revealed that 90hz will reduce the resolution to 1920x1920 per eye, I cancelled. I can make compromises but this res is at Quest Pro levels and in turn the reason why I didn’t get that HMD which would have been an instabuy at 2.5k+ per eye for me.
That’s why the AVP will be a definite buy for me even though gaming will most likely be an afterthought.
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A lot has to do with games you play. If it’s sims then the size of the HMD won’t matter so much, if it’s fast FPS then BSB makes more sense.
Also ET won’t matter so much on BSB because of the lower resolution.
So far we have Crystal at one end of the scale, BSB at the other with the VR-1 sitting in the middle but with a skewed price.
There’s still space for a mid priced 2880x2880, OLED, 125FoV with eye tracking HMD. Vive Pro 3 anyone???
It is a bit annoying indeed that we get headsets offering progress on some features while other features are left to stagnate or even regress, and nobody is capable of binding it all together.
I am fully aware that that will sometimes be due to physical boundaries, e.g. the Beyond wouldn’t be so small & comfortable if it had ET, HT, audio, wireless (which necessitates a battery) etc. on board, but still I feel that there would be opportunities to improve even more within the boundaries of what currently is technically feasible at reasonable cost.
If start-ups like Beyond and Somnium even have a chance to compete it shows that there is a lack of a successful concentrated corporate effort to get a next gen PC VR headset out there. Some companies surely have spent more than enough, but PC VR isn’t their focus (Meta) or even on their wish list at all (Apple).
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This is VERY very true. It’s the whole reason Pimax can even remain in business while operating in that usual sloppy “pimax” way and still stay in business. The big guys either didnt care or even stepped back (hp/samsung for example). But yeah, the tide slowly seems to turn into our advantage again, the new iphone that can record VR video’s is an awesome move and Samsung is looking to step back in if the reports are true.
Honesly it’s hard to see a future without mass VR/AR adoptation. Who wants to record his video in 2d in some years when all phones have 3d recording possibility and you can see that extra dimension with AR/VR ? I’m sure in 5-10 years that that’s going to be the standard way.
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What you mean by skewed VR1 price? All we can do so far is guess at around the 2k+/- range, right?
Just ordered 
Spatial video recording was actually one of the main reasons I went for it!
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By all means if you think 2k+ is good then go for it. Personally Pimax with built in eye tracking and audio fir £1600 is too high.
All I can say is the VR-1 won’t sell well at 2k+. Not when we see what’s coming at CES 2024.
That really depends on how good it is. If their dual lens system is ground breaking and offers way better image fidelity than Pimax/Varjo, I’m sure it will sell well. But yeah, if it’s pretty similar to those, then it will obviously fail. At that price point it really has to be substantially better, considering that it’s arriving quite late at the party.
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I think the VR-1 optics will be slightly worse. Because it uses two lenses and there’s a chance for internal reflections. No audio makes it more expensive. Reliance on LH tracking out of the box will push people to Crystal for simming. The only thing it really has going for it is the FOV using Asphericsl lenses.
The lack of any YouTuber experience has me worried too.
I expect a lens masterclass from what they have been touting.
Simmers (with motion rigs) need LH tracking for motion compensation.
No audio isn’t confirmed.
I expect the timeline to slip massively though.
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Crystals lens is the best thing about it so not sure how Somnium can better it. Going for 125FoV has a chance of being slightly worse.
I just feel the VR-1 will have a hard time justifying 2k if that’s what it turns out to be.
That’s note true.
I have a Yaw2, and the OpenXR motion compensation is working perfectly with the Crystal Inside-Out Tracking
The form factor with this can add immersive value in fps games.
ET can also be more used for immersive experience.
Agreed, there are kinematic motion compensation systems.
Didn’t say it was a good price, was just checking I didn’t miss any price rumors lol. You almost made it sound like you know the price. The actual statement at the time was “between the Pico4 and the Apple Vision Pro”.
So the cheaper variant at something like 1.2k to 1.5k.is not completely impossible IMO.
I dont think I’d buy any HMD for 2K unless it was basically perfect in every way (seems basically impossible with the way things are currently going) and solidly future proof for at least a couple of years. I have an Aero now but got it a lot cheaper.
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Glad I canceled my preorder, that glare sounds pretty damn bad. Not convinced the lacking brightness is not an issue in flight sims either. A sunny day without brightness sucks.
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