Clickbait sarcasm. Duh.
Pretty sure I have read this sort of suggestion in the forums more than once now.
Well, I was there, at CES, and the NYC roadshow event, and pretty well involved.
Everything about the optical performance of the 8kX with common desktop VR apps presented publicly at CES and roadshow was completely transparent. VR applications were not selected to give a good demo with the headset. DCS World, AeroflyFS2, Virtual Desktop, Elite Dangerous, Boneworks, and perhaps a couple much less impressive roomscale apps, were simply what was available to be tested and known to work at the time.
The demos are generally worse than what most experienced users will be able to achieve on their own for a variety of reasons, including vergence-accommodation conflict. I have made that point more than once already.
- There are not enough VR applications to pick and choose for fitness to a specific VR headset demo, rather than general relevance and public interest. DCS World, XPlane11, Elite Dangerous… among others… yup, they look about the same! Detailed PavlovVR maps, Onward, Alyx… yup, they look about the same! Distortions would be, and are, about equal with these categories.
- The VR industry itself is simply not large enough (as of 2020-05-17) to justify developing something just to demo a particular headset. Alyx itself is the closest thing there is to an exception - the reflex sight is unrealistically designed to look cool at the higher refresh rate of the Valve Index.
- The only optimizations specifically made for the 8kX were from my spreadsheets, applied after I arrived, and I had already made public. In-App settings, like MSAA, texture quality, etc, are all set to reasonable values, and could often be set higher without performance failures, which impressed many of the participants in the demos. The PiTool version used at the roadshow was nothing special, which should be abundantly clear since I have had every reason to upgrade to newer versions.
Primarily, the benefit of events like CES and the roadshow is to roughly provide potential users an idea of what to expect, far beyond what can be achieved from such things as Through-The-Lens footage and such. Secondarily, I think it may be a good opportunity to engage with the community and get some real-time feedback.
In fact, the CES and roadshow demos were far from perfect, but did serve these more realistic goals. Actually, the Pimax CES 2020 8kX demos were arguably awful. In particular, the flight sims were essentially noninteractive (no HOTAS controls), but users could seen how sharp the HUD text and instruments were. That was important. By the time of the roadshow, the flight sims were better setup with a real HOTAS, OVRDrop panels could be shown, and Elite Dangerous was available (which looks very impressive). However, in hindsight, even more could be done specifically for the 8kX, like a Snellen test.
With obviously only a few 8kX units even in existence at the time, it is ludicrous to suggest there was room to even seriously attempt any shady sleight-of-hand .
What is the real reason reviews of the headsets may go down a bit with more ‘hands on’ use after the show?
Simple. Even being one of the lucky few current Pimax users or IRL pilots to get a couple hours at an 8kX during CES or the roadshow, usually does not compare with actually having the headset for days to weeks. Then you get a much better impression of its capabilities, and where it falls short. Especially, you get to find out what you are involuntarily looking past - I did not notice the distortion on the 8kX until I specifically looked for it in roomscale apps. Because I usually have trained myself to ignore such things.
Since I have an 8kX, I would know that too.
This does not just apply to Pimax. It applies to every VR headset company using typical desktop PC VR apps at present.
Even the XTAL demo - which was super souped up on a very powerful delta-robot 6DOF motion simulator, had some significant issues, far from a ‘perfect demo’.
Finally, please do not misunderstand my tone. I am not at all angry, just exhaustively clarifying something that does not seem to have any mysteries to me.