Im looking to buy either a rift, or the pimax to play project cars exclusively. I don’t care much for tracking as long as the head rotation tracking is responsive and has no drift. I have been a long time cardboard user and have some doubts about gyroscope based head tracking especially without an anchor point of some sort.
Those of you who have the pimax, how long are you able to play racing simulators on it? Does the screen drift? Anyone who has had experience with both care to share your experience?
For me, the center in steamvr changes position every now and then (the viewing angle), but in most games you can use a recenter button. Project Cars has a recenter button I think. I haven’t ever had the problem that I have seen with the HDK2 for instance, where your head drifts sideways. It’s always firmly on your body.
The Pimax’s rotational tracking is excellent. I have never had a problem with it except for occasional recentering.
I only have Radial G, so can only talk about that, but in my experience the Pimax is great for simulation games. I could play Radial G all night, if the game itself wasn’t tiring. I haven’t had comfort issues, can regularly play for 2 hours at a time.
The biggest problem with Pimax is the ghosting, but in simulation, cockpit games, racing games, it’s barely noticeable because you aren’t moving your body around so much. I haven’t tried the Rift, but for driving games I imagine the image quality and relatively low (it does exist) SDE is more important than positional tracking.
So basically yeah, I’d say for driving games it’ll be fine.
I only encounter this when I turn my head far to the left or right, which is easily recentered. As long as I keep my head inside of a 140 or so degree radius, it doesn’t seem to happen at all.
I have a drift problem with Elite dangerous but not with the game Thumper. im guessing theres a fix somewhere since thumper always seems to start in a certain direction despite what direction the device is facing, eg the game always start facing North. this could be the “auto center” function in the options menu or just something in the games software. either way Thumper has something that other games like Elite and Project cars doesnt and must be prought to the games creators attention asap.
i only use the pimax for Elite Dangerous and the drift is appalling. Lucky i use voice attack and created a voice command to recenter the head track, but it get annoying having to do this every 30 seconds or so.
I am going to be testing to see if i start the game at compass north and see if it stays without drift - if it does i will need to rearrange my office! i think i am pointing SW at the moment so i will report back once i have tried it.
i am still in my early testing of a fix for this issue… i too had major drift whenever i looked around, i suspected the magnetic giro as i am right in the south of NZ and i also face south for gaming - just the way my office is set up
i was having to reset my HMD center at least twice a min in ED. but i have just been trying this out with a bit of sucsess… might not be a perfect fix but does really seem to help
locate magnetic north using a compass. place the headset on a surface and measure the distance from floor to the height of the HMD. (i used a dinning room chair so its about 50cm height).
let piplay see the pimax and go into pimax mode and launch steamvr from within piplay.
click room setup in SteamVR and follow the prompts - when you hit how high is the HMD when calibrating the floor i chose 50cm, (you put in what ever your height it)
finish calibration
now run your game… for me i have only had to center once in the last 15 mins. and the drift was only about 2degrees to the left - there is apparently always a little drift in VR Headsets but i think this is amount (small adjustment every 15 ins is far better than twice a min). So what i do is i use voice attack for in game voice commands and have created a voice command called RESET which resets the HUD to center so i dont have to toggle out of the game and it is not intrusive or ruins immersion .
I know how frustrating this issue is and i hope that this might help some of you. i am going to be moving my desk and office around to accommodate the magnetic north position to minimise the drift later today
and i will update this post after a longer session to let you know if drift has improved over a longer stint
ok so i have moved the office around and reset up steam vr as mentioned earlier while the HMD is pointing magnetic north,
I have had ED running of over a hour now and have only had to reset the center twice, and both times it was when i alt tabbed out of the game to check emails… i have not had to recenter while in game once - amazing… as before i was re-centering at least twice a minute
i would suggest those of you suffering with serious lateral drift to give this a go.
height calibration only affects the height of your POV which is fixed when you configure your headest for a standing only experience in room setup, it does not affect anything else.
I’ll give the north centering a try
EDIT: no change for me, drift is still major and the more severe the more you turn your head thowards 90° left or right
