Hi folks! SF meetup is over and I wanted to share my experience. Nothing new for most, but a couple of things you may find interesting.
I own Oculus Rift w. TPCast adapter.
First headset I tried was 5K OLED with LeapMotion addon. It was a mostly black demo with some vivid colors. My take - leap motion gen.2 is still not good enough for my use case (I want to build a VR app for playing real music instruments, starting w. piano) - basic shapes and poses work well, hands are tracked over wider area then gen.1 but precision is not there (for me). Nothing to say about 5K Oled on a mostly black demo (yet, keep reading).
Then I tried 5K Plus. Noticeable improvement over Oculus Rift, no doubt here. It was a relief for me, no regrets backing the project.
Then I tried 8K with Elite Dangerious. Honestly it was hard for me to see difference from the first try. Pixels a bit less noticable but tradeoff is known - more GPU power (read $$$) needed to get high quality.
That’s when I decided my choice is 5K Plus.
Then We tried switching back and forth on the same titles between helmets.
Beat saber main menu: 5K OLED then 5K Plus. My opinion - yes OLED has higher contrast no doubt, richer colors, but do I need that? 5K OLED has higher SDE at the same time, which I started noticing, unlike with 5K Plus. So I prefer 5K Plus with less eye strain from (too) high contrast.
Skyrim VR - 5K Plus and then 8K - again I did not pick up significant differences, though some other people present did see less SDE on 8K. But for me it was similar, and I remember that it’s more $$$ for something I don’t really feel like a significant improvement so my preference stayed with 5K Plus.
I asked to try Racket Nx - one of my favorite games so far (installed from Steam). The team was kind enough to allow using my Steam account to get it. As someone coming from Oculus Rift + TPCast, I immediately noticed the difference:
- everything is clearer, sharper
- FOV (normal mode, not “large” or “small”) is sufficient to play the game “normally”, unlike on Oculus - in games like this, which imitate tennis, you need to see your had far on the side, see the ball, and at the same time see the target, to make a precise hit. This is not possible on current gen headsets, which forces you to either looks away from your target, or from your hand, or pay with your hands more in front of you, which looks and feels a bit awkward (looks for sure). With the extended FOV the feel of playing tennis-like game is more natural. So I think wide FOV is very beneficial for such applications where side vision is important.
Then I asked to try Robo Recall. And again after some downloading, I was happily provided with that. First it wouldn’t start, then we rebooted the PC, then it would crash and we changed (disabled) reprojection in PiTool and dropped res to 1.0 and FOV to Normal (was Large). Then it started but the floor was too high. We use PiTool’s calibration and finally started again. This time it worked well. There were some minor graphical glitches (gray stitches on white loading screen for ex.) but otherwise looked good. FOV improved ability to see enemies. I noticed warping on the edges (left/right), for some reason it didn’t bother me before but this time I noticed it. The only and important problem was controls - same as with ReVive, mapping was not as good. Pressing trackpad would cause controller to vibrate non-stop and open menu, while sliding on it would allow selecting teleport direction, so it was very easy to open menu instead of teleporting. That pretty much ruined the experience (as teleporting is one of the main mechanics in this game). So for oculus games, as with ReVive - controller mapping may may experience less enjoyable. I love Robo Recall on Oculus but unly because it’s so seamless with controls and overall experience.
There was a gotcha during the demo - we switched FOV on the fly from Normal to Large and to Small etc - the image changed immediately, and I noticed on Large that the edges of vision were just weird warped something. I thought - ok - looks like Large mode is useless. But then I asked Robin (Robin?) and I was told it’s necessary to restart SteamVR. And surely enough after restarting the garbage-mirrored image on sides changed to more or less normal image, albeit more blurry then the center (I expected after all the reviews).
Some issues experienced:
There were two ladies and both said they could not use the helmets with their glasses on. So seems like some glasses may not fit inside, if they’re not super thin. Not sure here as I don’t wear glasses.
My main problem with the helmet was that it pressed heavily onto my nose. My nose is big and I have high IPD (seems) but even with high IPD set (and it’s important because IPD moves lenses away from each other, making more room for your nose in between!) I was not able to set up the strap in a way that would prevent this completely. Only when holding the headset at the bottom and moving it a tiny bit away from my face would I feel the pressure disappear. I don’t have this problem with Oculus Rift. They only had “thin” pads on the demo, so I could not check if a “think” version would fix that.
And my second problem was with the cable. Coming from TPCast’s wireless solution, I immediately found myself stepping onto and bound by the damn cable. Robin told me the wireless solution is planned for Q2 or Q3 2019 (might be wrong) release and price - unknown so far. Veeeery much looking forward to this, it’s a MUST for room scale, sports and any 360 games.
Some notes on delivery: December for 2.7K-3K+ backers (no promises of course). Base stations are included they said, so those who ordered a full set should get at least headset + base stations. Controllers won’t be available until some time in 2019. So if you ordered a set - get yourself some used Vive sticks for the time being, I guess (I’m in the same boat).
There were a few improvised interviews recorded, including w. myself, hopefully will be published on the forum (if not already).
I’m voting for 5K plus, will same me money on hardware and I don’t need the extra contrast but worse SDE of OLED version, so I’ll be saving my $100 (I’m an 8K full set backer) and will use it for something else (towards wireless for ex.).
P.S. sorry for typos and missed letters, too tired to fix 
