First off I understand the PR fiasco and Pimax needs to address and resolve this matter with the community so we can all move on with our lives.
But assuming we live in the alternate universe where pimax said fk it we’ll do this for free but its going to be 100 fov, crashes half the time. It’ll not support dynamic foveated rendering and other stuff they are promising.
What do you guys plan to do with it? I am really curious. I personally find it annoying to cough 200$ and i understand why people are pissed but seriously if the 200$ for backers can solve a lot of the issues some with lenses or other stuff and do foveated rendering and help run games id gladly choose 200 over a free POS that is going to lie there and collect dust.
Glad you posed this question. If Pimax had acted as you describe it, a rather vocal part of the backers would have done their favorite backer thing: complain.
I for my part would have said „I told you so“ because at the time of the KS campaign I thought to myself „Wow, Pimax is just getting carried away, they‘ll never be able to provide all of these goodies on top at the KS price - so some of the stretch goals will be crap versions of the technology they are calling out“.
I am rather glad they chose quality over slavish compliance with the original announcement: what good would it have done anybody to get a cheap eye-tracking solution which would not be satisfactory ? It would have ticked the backer box for being provided free-of-charge; sure. But it would be used for a day or two, collect dust afterwards and not be supported by anybody in the industry anyhow as it would perform as required to make sense.
What some people just don‘t seem to get is that Pimax are trying to create sustainable business, not fold their operations right after having completed the KS deliveries.
I’m more excited about the possibility of eye tracking with DFR - something we were never promised with these headsets. This is so far ahead of the game and it looks like we are getting it as a bootstrap item. I consider $200 a well worth investment for functioning DFR. I never wanted to play eye-pong or whatever eye tracking can do outside of DFR.
hIndeed - at the time I was quite curious to see if the eye-tracking they threw into the mix was going to be capable of FDR - they never confirmed that, which made me suspect that we’d end up with some kind of menu-guiding low end solution miles away from being FDR capable - hence my delight with their announcement.
I get it that 200$ is a lot of money; certainly if you looking to get the 8KX too. But honestly, most people won’t need the eye-tracking capability that soon as practically no game supports FDR today nor do social apps use eye-gaze yet. Once that changes, you can get it then - it might have dropped in price by that time. Only those who suffer from distortion or convergence issues will have an additional reason to hope that it may be truly useful to them, for all others it remains to be a gimmick for the time being.
But the important thing is, we have reason to hope that Pimax are introducing capable advanced tech into the VR headsets which can push VR - that’s what I care most about.
Worst case I would do exactly same thing as with those I get now (none).
100 fov tracking would be enough for me, I don’t look more to the side anyway, because then you see the nose guard and the image is mess. As far as I am concerned the extra FOV is for peripheral vision.
If it crashes half the time then it just means they can’t do the SW right and the new tracker will crash as much (probably more as it is bigger fov so more difficult).
The dynamic foveated rendering doesn’t need to be directly supported by the game. It uses variable rate shading like the fixed foveated rendering, so it should work in a lot of games.
I was referring to the time when the KS campaign was still live and people could join or remove their pledge again - at that time Pimax carefully avoided promising suitability of the eye-tracking for any advanced functionalities like FDR. Just mentioning it because some of the backers are angry about the 200,- charge for it where it was supposed to come for free. Which is generally understandable but they then need to appreciate that they would never have been entitled to demand/expect such a high end eye-tracking solution. And what good does any lower-end solutuon do them - that‘s the question they need to ask themselves.
As I mentioned elsewhere, there we solutions being advertised at the time for really low amounts if produced in quantities, which may have been the reason Pimax believed they could deliver „something“ for free. But it was unclear what they would have been capable of, and then of course all of those were assuming you have a standard 90 degrees FoV.
Hmm, have heard different things about this aspect - the real gains in terms of GPU usage come where the peripheral part is rendered in low-res right from the start. If that can be steered from solely the driver level or outside the game, not so sure. But I have no real knowledge on that subject unfortunately.
I’ll posit that the special model, and its associated higher price is not for making the unit track your eye across a larger field of view; Your eye slit sits unmoving where it sits, and the tracking camera sees all of it, and as such figures out any direction it is looking, regardless of whether you are using one of the current $200 models, or one of the p8k/5k $300 ones.
No, the BOM should be pretty much identical to the cheaper “mainstream” model, save an extra illumination IR LED or two, and a few milligrams more plastic for the larger frame.
The price hike would be almost entirely due to needing to recoup engineering-, and tooling costs, and production of a separate small series SKU for the larger form factor.
It seems to be in a weird spot where a lot of games don’t officially support foveated rendering, but if they work with variable rate shading then foveated rendering can be successfully forced into the game.
Maybe (I don’t know enough about this to make conclusion), but that would mean they were misleading us again. Two main reasons stated for extra cost were adjusting for bigger FOV and dealing with canted displays.
