You talk about FSR in the video.
Yet, isn’t that an AMD technology and not an nVidia one?
Since you have a 4090, I’m confused if you’re talking instead about DLSS
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FSR is hardware agnostic and works on anything, though it produces a worse image quality than DLSS due to lack of hardware acceleration.
There’s a popular mod which lets you put FSR into almost any VR game, part of the VRPerfkit, can give some serious performance gains. Meanwhile, DLSS support in VR is very rare.
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Wait, the DMAS upgrade requires you to pay the full price by May 31st, it’s not based on pre-ordering by May 31st? I was under the impression it was the latter, if not then that’s sneaky imo.
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Nope. Nordic said by June you had to purchase. Also on PIMAX website still I think.
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Thanks @SmallBaguette and @Omniwhatever for sharing your impressions, it is really appreciated!
It feels as though there is a nice product in there somewhere; if nothing majors pops up I’ll look into getting a Crystal by the end of the year from amazon.de as a sidegrade for my VR-3. If nothing else, it’ll save me the €800 annual license.
The ‘plastic lense’ issue, however, is disconcerting. We had the same issue back when the OG 8K campaign was happening, and in the end, users were shown amazing edge do edgle clarity lenses (made from glass) on roadshows and the ‘final product’ used cheap, plastic fresnel lenses.
I hope we’re not in for this sort of evelopment this time around. Aspheric lenses had their place prior to the OG Oculus KS (think devkits), were then replaced by the light and cheap fresnel lenses, and have experienced a ‘2nd summer’ since the VR-3/Aero showed what clarity could be achieved.
I feel their thunder is losing momentum now that we have the first high-nit micro-OLED panels in combination with pancake lenses becoming increasingly available.
I wonder if Pimax will be able to throw adequate R&D budgets towards proprietary lens and display tech; the age of combining off-the shelf components into an HMD with a home-brew software stack are quickly coming to an end I fear.
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Amd unlike Nvidia often develops Open technology that benefits more than just there brand see GpuOpen. FSR 1.0 can be used on old graphics cards including some igpu ones in the Intel line up from iirc 5+ years ago.
Similarly Mantle was designed that other vendors could have used it and as such is a big part that lead to Vulkan.
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Very nice so in a nutshell pimax maybe implying the Glass final lenses might increase the FoV to maybe matching there internal claims of a larger FoV.
Strange though if they had just disclosed the lenses testers around the world are not given the final release lenses. They could have avoided damaging there reputation by claiming fov test/extraction tools are incorrect.
Instead this looks like a new development they hadn’t considered disclosing due to discovery. The engineers must not be communicating information to other departments properly. Which is quite possible given the history.
@PimaxQuorra @jaapgrolleman is this correct? Internal communication issues on the lenses FoV due to shipping not final glass lenses?
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This interesting and tbh I suspect just a rumour that ppl jumped on. While I cannot comment on the v3, v5 or the Berlin Backer Meetup.
The V2 that I had direct xp seem to have plastic lenses. Sure they were custom hand made. Vs mass produced lenses from molds that would have been made from a hand crafted set. To which one of the professional reporters did note distortion similar to what we see in the final product and had asked directly about the 90hz. Which we discovered they were lying about the refresh rate being 90hz as the og 8k as we know never achieved 90hz and during the roadshows of the ks was initially in the 70s.
Molded lenses can have variances and we know in the early days of release pimax’s qc was not very tight or stringent. Vs HTC that was calibrating each headset to the lenses installed.
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@Omniwhatever thanks for the initial impressions, cool. I suppose mention of wireless performance is prohibited under the NDA?
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Exactly. If Bigscreen Beyond pulled a 103 FOV for £999 then why buy Crystal at all? Imagine the side by side comparison.
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Nice first impressions @Omniwhatever. Not sure why you need the gimp suit but the video was entertaining all the same. I’m looking forward to your second. I don’t know sign language but I’m sure it was helpful for those that do.
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For @Omniwhatever’s new video, I am quite surprised to know you can see the line 10 chars from 5m away ! It’s an amazing high resolution.
The most I concerned about Crystal is the reality level it can present. It’s good to know how it actually looks from a seasoned VR player.
Thanks for the video review ! 
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Wireless isn’t something we’ve had the chance to try yet.
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Do you mean you didn‘t find the time to try it yet (which would be completely understandable) or are you missing anything to actually be able to test it (say, a dongle or comparable)?
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The latter. Wireless functionality isn’t enabled at this time. I know as much as you do on whenever that functionality will be available.
If I’m not under NDA when it’s enabled, if it gets enabled during the beta test period, I plan on making a dedicated video for it since wireless is a bigger feature that probably deserves its own video.
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Hopefully they enable it as with the Sword controller the beta testers were supposed to get a preview of what they had.
But they were not confident in the function and have yet to do anything with it. Making it just wasted component that is there but not enabled.
Need someone like Guppy to hack the controller and enable it.
Hopefully the built in wireless and standalone mode don’t join the incomplete list of pimax endeavors.
Okay, I had hoped they would have completed the development of the more relevant features during the almost 7 months now since they announced the launch of the Crystal but made the caveat that i.a. standalone was not yet going to be functional.
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Behold, through a bunch of disfigurement of some Kiwi Quest 2 grips, I’ve made knuckle straps for the Pimax controllers which feel perfectly natural to hold and use, while also not blocking access to the type-c port for charging. Real scuffed aesthetics though. But I missed the knuckle grips and ability to actually let go of the controller too much.
Official straps when?
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Well, unlike the wireless & eye-tracking modules of the Vision series, which never appeared/thoroughly malfunctioned, here Pimax would be spending significant amounts of money to include the hardware components in the Crystal base offering which would be annoying dead weight and costly on top, if not put to proper use.
They will just have to take the time to sort everything out and, if need be, back-paddle on specs before offering the Crystal commercially - and see what happens if they still ask for the same price. I just hope they did not really produce several hundreds of them already. That would have been a predictably bad idea if you know that you haven’t resolved some greater issues yet. But okay, they can afford it these days given the external funding, so let’s lean back and see what happens.
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Pimax said it takes 6 months to ramp up so they must be producing thousands a month now - unless they actually down tooled while they sorted the lens problem out.
It calls into question if they were ready in September why did they not have glass lenses back then? If they had glass lenses what happened to them? Did they get dumped for a new version?
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