Not sure why people keep talking about IPD, when it obviously has nothing to with the (geometry) distortion issue’s that are discussed here. My IPD is measured by a professional, it’s correctly set, I have no eye strain at all.
I’m pretty sure distortion as described here happens because we don’t have dynamic distortion correction on the pimax headsets. Also the Pimax distortion profile might not be optimal at the moment
Yesterday I received my 5K+ and didn’t actually try it until today… to make a long story short, I swapped my 5K+ to Tyriel Wood for his one-day to come pre-order 5K+… I spent the afternoon at his place trying out the 5K+ and a bit of recording for his youtube channel. Something ain’t right…
Several weeks ago I was at the NY backer meetup and tested the 5K+ so I thought I would know what to expect… but the distortions or whatever you want to call them on the 5K+ I received was FAR more pronounced than the demo unit I tried at the backer-meet not too long ago. Something changed…
My IPD is low, not measured but I know it’s around 60-61, first thing I saw and commented on was the geometry distortion.
1st day I was disappointed with the brightness/black/color/distortion.
2nd day I was a little annoyed with the brightness/black/color.
3rd day I’m fine with the brightness and color and start to appreciate the extra clarity and lack of obvious SDE. (Its there but I don’t focus on it). Only the black level is the concern in dark games.
Don’t think I will ever plug in my vive again.
Hello everyone, backer #711, first post here.
I’m surprised that nobody, big names included, did not acknowledge a simple fact we know in relation to this issue: and that is, that Pimax -as far as I know- does not calibrate the distortion matrix individually for each headset. EDIT: I stated this as a fact - I should correct that this is just my suspicion.
It had come to the attention of the Vive subreddit, during the days of the Gear VR lenses replacement mod, that it was possible to change the distortion matrix; one guy even came up with different versions of this matrix for the Gear VR lenses, only to find out that it would work for some people and not for others.
And the reason is simple: individual headsets have slightly different position for the screens and lenses, and hence a different distortion matrix. The reason the Vive “works” is that every single headset is factory calibrated for its unique geometry, and the result of this calibration is stored in the firmware. As far as I know, this does not happen with Pimax.
The reason @SweViver and others didn’t notice during their testing, is - maybe - because they managed to find a matrix that works for the few headsets they produced back then, but now with mass production the results may vary wildly.
They also said they were going to calibrate the colors on the 5K+ screens god knows how long ago but it still looks like it has not been done.
Interesting, it could be that the distortion profile needs to be adapted to the IPD.
No, it needs to be adapted to the specific geometry of every headset - because despite mass production, every headset is different, and with the eyes so close, even a very small difference in screen and/or lens position affects the distortion.
I thought it was common knowledge, but nobody in this thread brought this up.
Maybe.
Pimax should do a calibration app that every users should run at the first time. You know, series of objects or lines shown on the screen and pick the one that looks best to you and it’d make and save the distortion profile.
Just an idea coming from a welder (@SweViver obs! 
)
How did the guys come to the conclusion that it was differences between HMD and not differences between users?
You talk about how even a very small difference affects distortion, I can’t imagine how the differences between HMD could be bigger than the IPD range used by different users (0.1mm vs 10mm?).
We need to know if Pimax used only one IPD to generate their distortion profile, if so they should either provide a calibration tool or generate a distortion profile for each IPD.
We need a survey to know the IPD of users who experience the highest distortion.
@anon74848233 @deletedpimaxrep1 @Pimax-Support
please answer to this important calibrate issue
I know that it was said by Daniel O’Brian from HTC that while he is all in for people modding their Vive, he did want to warn them that they would lose the benefit of the calibrated profile if they did the GearVR lens swap, and when they later decided to go back and stuff in the original Vive lenses again, they likely would not fit in exactly as they did when being calibrated.
On the other side, I have still to hear form anybody having done the swap and having gone back that he now finds the Vive with original lenses to perform noticeably worse than before. Sure, you could argue that it will still end up near the untouched position because any individual deviations of e.g. the socket would still of course remain the same, but I am not sure how big an effect that really is.
That is not to say that it wouldn’t be good to have such individual calibration be performed on the Pimax headsets, but I would need to have more information to properly assess the impact to be expected from it.
Interesting, so a factory calibration for each headset is mandatory, otherwise users will run into distortion problems without having a chance to fix it by themselves? If this is true and Pimax is skipping this process, this might become a huge issue.
I guess maybe it is not just IPD, but the exact angle and x, y position of the lenses. Eg. one lens rotated by 0.01 degrees might cause distortion? Just a guess. Maybe variance in position of screens also.
If memory serves me correctly… several months ago and Pimax missing the ETA for delivery, Pimax posted a message about one of the delays was due to waiting for special equipment to actually do this geometry for the lenses. And it was discussed a bit here in the forum…
Possible, but Emanuelle is referring to modded Vive.
Are original Vive and Rift using different calibrated profile for each headset? I am not sure about that.
I cannot claim to be 100% sure, but I deducted it from several users on this thread, as well as the subreddit, describing the problem the same way Sebastian did at some point this summer - that the world was “turning around with him”. This is easily explained with an incorrect distortion matrix, and the fact that they managed to fix on the prototype headsets via software seems to corroborate this analysis.
It also follows reasonably from the need of individual, tool-assisted calibration for each headset and the fact that Pimax never mentioned this was happening.
So they either are not doing it or are not doing it right, if such a significant number of people are having issues with it. IPD alone does not explain it - most of us here are advanced users, I’m confident the people reporting on it have already tried changing such an easily-adjustable setting.
At least @tomohm is saying that there is a difference between his 5K+ and the one he tried at NY backer meetup.
So it is possible that there is a real problem with some HMDs.
I think one way to settle this is if people (or at least someone) who have problems with inner distortion take their Pimax and meet up with someone who doesn’t and try each other’s HMDs to see if the problem is really a defective HMD.
It would make sense that each HMD would be pre calibrated regarding distortion indeed.
But I would like to know if HTC and Oculus do it, if so we need to make sure that Pimax does it to.
I still think that due to the larger FOV we need to investigate the idea of a distortion profile adapted to IPD.
At the end it would be both, so we can push Pimax to integrate a calibration app to PiTool to dynamically adjust the distortion profile.
@anon74848233 can you tell if each individual headset is calibrated for distortion or not?