I doubt it has been missed but it’s been quite a while now with no response.
The official spec sheet says:
But the reality seems to be 103 degrees according to a current Chinese tester. I tried the crystal and was happy with it, but would like to know the actual FOV numbers before paying for it. It’s not impossible that the tester that got those numbers had something going wrong with their device or such. I know that thread got very messy, which is why I’m making a separate thread to ask for a response and get clarification. Ideally something like Risa2000 showing correct numbers, or a screenshot of ROV test. Thanks in advance!
Just to clarify, that 103 number was at the 35PPD setting. If it was the 42PPD setting then it wouldn’t be a major concern, but going from advertised 125 to 103 is very alarming. It’s normal for companies to round up (like HTC does it, but only within 1-4 degrees).
It has been over a week since the teater info came out and still nothing. This is the quietest I have ever seen Pimax. I know it was CNY but this is really starting to getting concerning…
That ain’t the major problem here. Multiple staff on the Pimax Discord had a note in their status indicating they were out of office until the 29th due to CNY, including some of the main ones who interacted with the community, and it’s no longer the 29th. We’ve even seen a couple of posts here from Pimax staff following that date, yet no answer.
We’ve seen that the western Pimax staff is either posting a bunch of twitter(Like Sweviver) about the Portal and pointedly ignoring questions about this, we’ve seen that Kev(PimaxUSA) has been very regularly lurking these forums as they show up in the online status often. Yet there’s been nothing concerning this OR communication with the global testers about updates on when maybe we’ll get things. China group has had it for well over a week now, some youtubers have even gotten units(Shipped from CES, yes), but we still have no clue when the global team is going to even get ours. We might not get them till close to the end of the month at this rate, considering shipping times!
It has been damn near complete radio silence from Pimax, even when we know they’re here, and that does not inspire confidence. One of the beta testers seems like they’ve decided to completely backout since they left a group with some of us and the Pimax discord. And I’m on the fence about it as well from all this. If this is all just somehow coincidental, Pimax picked a really, really bad time for everything. But the silence is damning when we know Pimax staff are seeing it and choosing to ignore it all.
EDIT: And about 15 minutes after this, one of the staff finally came online and said something concerning the beta testers at least. About bloody time. Still nothing on the FoV thing going on here, which is still kind of eeeeeeh.
I am not on the side of Pimax, but I just want to point out that those FOV tests are not a precise way to get the concrete numbers.
Different people have different face shapes. Some testers’ eyes are farther away from the lens than others. As you should already know, if your eyes getting farther away from the lens, the less FOV you will get.
Therefore, if I use very thin padding, or get my eyes very close to the lens, I will get larger FOV. Make sense?
Without knowing the distance between the testers eyes to the lens, we cannot say, “Hey, the testers get FOV number 103, why are your advertising as 125?”
So the real question should be: “What test parameters the official claim 125 degree FOV was based on?” What’s the observe distance from the lens that Pimax did the measurement? And what about the IPD number and resolution for the measurement?
Btw, Chinese New Year is like Christmas and New Year. It’s holidays, not just one week. After CNY we have YuanXiao Festival, which is like Chinese Thanksgiving and Valentine’s day.
Before CNY a lot of people will go back to their hometowns to be with their families. Only today( 2/1 ) the huge wave of “going back to work” just started. The factories are mostly closed from CNY to YuanXiao Festival.
I would like to point out the 103 number does NOT come from subjective impressions and would not be subject to variance in face shape. It comes from a program which grabs the rendered maximum of the headset, the values that the headset itself reports to applications so that the applications know exactly how much FoV it does or doesn’t need to render. You’ll always get equal to or less than this number because of that.
That’s why people are so antsy about it, since it’s not a number which is going to change based on your faceshape.
The rendered FOV does not depend on the user’s IPD. The visible FOV might, if the headset uses fixed panel - movable lens design (as Pimax 5k/8k did). On “chambered” headsets (as Index, Vive, Quest, etc.), IPD should not impact even the visible FOV.
I think ideally the rendered FOV should be perfectly represented through the lens, but maybe in Crystal it’s being “Zoom In” by the aspheric lens? Like the view is actually closer than it was rendered in 3D space? So even when the reported FOV is 103 degrees, but the view we actually see is larger?
Going by the Varjo Aero and what people have measured with it, subjectively and comparing it to Risa’s tool results, considering it has a very similar lense design, no that’s not the case.
The only similarity is they both use aspheric lens. Varjo Aero lens has unique property of center 35ppd and outer ring being 27ppd, while Pimax never said they made a display this way.
Of course the rendered view should be perfectly match the angles in the 3D space. However, maybe Crystal didn’t make it this way, because the calibration was manually done by near-sighted technicians?
Yeah, I am also waiting for an explanation from Pimax. Just want to give out some reasonable doubt before we announce them guilty.
No man. They’ve said before that’s how it works. It’s the same as the Varjo in that respect, it’s a convex design. Plus, simple math says you simply cannot have a headset that has such a close resolution to the Aero(2880 x 2720 vs the Crystal’s 2880 x 2880) and yet somehow manages to have 35PPD across the whole screen while the Aero can’t, ESPECIALLY if you are claiming such a wider FoV than it.
I get wanting to play devil’s advocate, but it’s kind of grasping at straws right now. The assumptions you’d have to make, that have any kind of legitimacy, are pretty far beyond reasonable doubt at this point, if you ask me.
But is it not possible that Crystal’s displayed pictures are slightly “Zoom In”?
Because if it does, it explains everything about the FOV discrepancy, doesn’t it?
So please explain to me that why you think Crystal will display the image in 1 to 1 ratio, but not 1.2 to 1? Is it really physically impossible for its lens to display an image in 1 to 1.2 ratio (125/103 = 1.21)?
Afaik, no. That would result in the world scale being off and other issues. Were that possible then I think we’d have been seeing it already. I don’t know the exact details, not that educated in the field, but I have seen that question come up with more knowledgeable people in the industry before and the answer was quite strictly no. Of course, who knows what happens in the future but if Pimax had made some sort of huge breakthrough in this regard then we would have heard about it long ago.
Ultimately, what reason is there to believe that crystal is the first and only headset to do what you’re suggesting? I still think there’s some hope that the 103 may have been wrong in someway, like early hardware issue or such, although I find it unlikely. That said I am pretty shocked by the advertising of 125 degree horizontal if that’s the case. An official response would clear this up well, and hopefully we’ll get one soon.
I think it’s a mistake to give multiple testers different models. I mean you need a base from which to build. If issues are reported and everyone’s on different iterations and FW then how is it possible the rectify the issue?
How hard is it for one person from either Pimax or one of the 15 testers to report on this?
Either there’s a cover up going on behind the scenes or……we’ll I can’t think of any other reason not to say we see it and we’re looking in to it.
I said the above because sometimes when playing VR videos I would zoom in and watch the video more “closely”. I didn’t feel anything off or uncomfortable in a zoom-in state. And since a simple VR video player can do zoom in and out easily, a headset might also be doing that without anyone noticing.
I don’t think Pimax made a mistake on beta testing. If anything, the issue of 103 FOV proves the necessity of beta testers. It’s way better to discover this issue now, than we consumers finding out after the $1700 purchase.
Let me try to explain why it makes no sense what you are suggesting. Ok so you have a headset with optics that can show 125 degrees but the software would only render 103 degrees, right? It would look bad because it indeed would feel like a zoomed in image. And why would anyone do that? Why not just render the 125 degrees that it can show? The image would then be correct and you would also see more of the virtual world. So it really would not make sense to render less fov than the optics can show (and if you worry about gpu power then just limit the FoV but not zoom it out. Exactly like pimax does)
