I have so much other stuff on at the moment I have not had proper time to play with the 8K aside from a few moments here and there. I haven’t set up my singular base-station yet either. However, after a very easy setup and installation of software, attaching my own VR Cover thicker foam (due to horrible edge distortion with the standard foam) and playing with things with an xbox One controller; my first impressions of the FOV weren’t that great to be honest. I wasn’t really blown away at all and felt quite muted, that is until I did a comparison with the Oculus GO. Then you really appreciate the difference which is quite substantial (using Large FOV here).
I think what the software could have on boot-up instead of the static Home Planet is a quick opening sequence (lasting a few seconds) showing the narrow FOV of other HMDs then in real-time stretching out to show the Normal, then Large FOV. Imagine a cinema curtain being opened. This would immediately highlight the massive differences.
Anyhow, other observations are, really missing out on a lot of content and features without the motion controllers. Pimax needs to hurry up with these.
Well that’s exactly what I said pretty much. At least we can agree then.
I think there is a reason for a lack of initial wow factor. Well, from my perspective at least. Up until now using VR one has muscle memory of focusing directly ahead and a deep learning which ignores the borders. When you first put on the wider FOV the mind is still looking forwards rather than at the bigger picture so it somewhat feels the same when in reality it’s not. I honestly think there is a settling in period which doesn’t really manifest itself until you do go back and try the narrower FOV headsets. Then your mind is like…
I have just been using Normal FOV and the difference is massive when I go back to my Go. I am beta testing a game on the Go which is why I brought it back out again a couple of days ago. I hadn’t used anything but my 5k+ since getting it a few months ago. It really is shocking to go back to one of the narrow FOV headsets after using only the Pimax for an extended period of time. I’ve tried the large FOV a few times but I really don’t see enough difference when using it over the normal FOV to justify the performance hit for the games I’ve been playing.
That would also be my tip for Pimax. They should even try to emulate the Vive pixels and then transition to Pimax resolution as well as opening the curtains to the wide FOV.
The wider FOV and larger sweet spot is great but the outer edges of the FOV only add to immersion.
The next step is when you focus your eyes on the outer areas you’ll have as much visual accuity as if you’d look straight ahead.
I hope that it will be possible with eye tracking
I don’t think eye tracking can help much with that with these current lenses. Because you will be looking sideways through the fresnel rings and that is probably messing up the clarity too
I have a fairly strong prescription and I tried my 5k without glasses one day as an experiment. When I looked to the far edge of the Pimax I was surprised to find that it was perfectly clear and I could even see the same SDE that I do with my glasses on looking forward. Without glasses it was blurry looking forward of course.
So it seems that for me at least the lenses have a focal problem on the far edges. I don’t think this can be solved by rearranging pixels like distortion can.
Tried large fov yesterday in a couple of titles (normally i use normal fov for all titles except ones with performance issues, in that case small fov).
I still can not understand what some are talking about („Gamechanger“ or similar). For me the added fov (from normal to large) is all in a area which is heavily distorted and/or blurred and therefore useless for me anyway.
Okay, i am as close as possible to the lenses without extra foam and with the DAS mod to angle the headset perfectly to my face shape). So there is where the distortions can come from. But i do not care because there the lenses blurr everything anyway. Or is my eyesight so bad already that it is only me who’s experience is like that? I can see until the edges of the normal fov really sharp and nice. Then the part of the lenses starts that looks like it is flatted out (is there the seam of the second part of the lens? I read somewhere that the lenses are merged from two parts).
I really tried to see sharp when my eyeballs are turned almost max to the sides. But i can not see anything in focus there. All blurred.
So the GPU power for the extra rendered pixels in that outside regions are totally wasted, especially with PP on. Almost 7k horizontal resolution per eye in Project Cars2? Insane!
Which brings me to a suggestion: @PimaxVR
Please think about an feature similar to the philips ambilight tvs where the area of the outer region of the panel is filled with information of the outermost pixels of the normal fov.
It could be added as a brainwarp feature and would look similar to the vorpX-cinema-ambient setting but only in the far periphery and give you the feeling of a maxed out fov while GPU power needed is drasticly reduced.
I did read once about someone who added ambilight to his rift, only with 20 or so added rgb leds in the space outside the lenses on each side inside the headset. Supposedly the goggles effect was immediately gone… So maybe it could be a nice feature for the small fov setting, too?
I’d say it’s the larger sweet spot and the added immersion of noticing something in your peripheral vision even if the details aren’t there.
Human peripheral vision is bad, that’s why there isn’t really a big loss of iniformation and the large setting adds little benefit.
The clarity drop off sharply if not looking straight ahead, so FFR should be great at conserving resources once it works.
Hope to see your suggestions added to the software
Interesting post, but @mr.uu what is the point to have a HMD with 170 FOV and then you roll back to 150 or 130 FOV ??? For me the perfect HMD would be (in FOV case) that all my vision is cover by it , not to see any sign of the outer world, now our perfect sweetpot is only 30 degree (more or less, see pic), so FFR is the perfect resource optimizer. For all the distortion around of view; I do not want to see it black (normal and small FOV) and remembering all those HMD from the past like looking through a tube. Pimax in this case has the priority to make a perfect large FOV, really clearer on the sweetspot and degrade our outer view.
And for FFR they said it would be a gain of like 8% if I remember correctly.
I guess for better results we need FR to be implemented to the game engine itself by devs.
For me, I just don’t see much difference between the 170 (large) mode and the 150 (normal) mode. I would also like to get an FOV wide enough to not see any black at all but the jump from 150 to 170 just doesn’t seem all that significant to me. Maybe I need to try the large mode some more, but normal seems to be just as satisfying for me so far.
