Hi,
i wonder if they have a plan to increase the clarity of their lenses.
On my PIMAX Artisan about 30% is clear and due to the fact that you have a huge FOV there is time when one eye is clear and other one is in a blurry zone because you look in the corners.
It causes eye strain.
I’m happy with the Artisan and i would like to try the 8KX but i will not go for it due the lenses. It makes no sense to have a huge FOV and a clear image only on 20% of the lenses and eye strain everywhere else.
actually lenses on Pimax are quite good ones but lenses axis have convergence so IPD isn’t only adjustment that is vital to achieve clear vision, eye relief is not less important than IPD: https://community.openmr.ai/t/clarifying-near-ipd-x-distant-ipd-confusion/14809
First of all their system IMO needs eye tracker (to have dynamical distortion profile) & they work on it, now they have have module not sure why their HMDs still dont have eye relief adjustment (as it can be done cheap e.g. as it was done in OG Vive).
I have clarity on 60-70% of lenses but it’s highly subjective matter & this kind of HMD (with canted panels & lenses) seems to be really tricky in terms of plug & pay experience for majority of ppl.
You can have an eye tracker if you look in the corner thru a blurry lens it will change nothing.
Check the clarity of the new HP Reverb G2.
check the clarity of 2 years old vive pro Vive Pro Through The lenses Footage 4k - YouTube lol
It’s made with a mobile phone (with filter).
It’s pointless, you can’t even see the sde which is huge.
all those TTLs including G2 also pointless apart of some details like pixels patterns, I have 13 + 1 HMDs & perceived image is also different than what you see on all those videos, and yes it’s NOT huge, if it would be huge no one filter would be able to process such a crisp image from OG Vive level input image
And you are wrong, it is huge.
As this video that shows no sde for the Artisan when it is huge.
And how do you communicate perceived image thru the web media? Like in science a value is better then no value at all if you know how to interpreted it. if settings and equipment is kept constant between the videos relative comparison can be made between the headsets. knowing that focus, colors, contrast can be modify the the equipment capturing and rendering the video.
if your paid attention some detail can emerge like the reverberation on the hood of the car in corsetta seen on the G2 TTL by tyriel. I was think it was a setting in the game. But then after viewing the same effect on the samsung gear mod on the cosmos vs original I wonder… so yes TLL video can contain information if the done by the same person with care and in the same conditions…
Well, then really don’t go for the 8KX - one of my current struggles to make it work for me without greater eye-strain & headache is the issue that I can only get one eye look through the inner sweet spot, but never both at the same time. My IPD of 64 seems to be too narrow, when I measure the center of the fresnel sweet spot in hardware IPD setting 60 (as narrow as I can set it), these two are approx. 67-68. Sure, I have played with the software IPD, but that won’t change the acuity which seems only available in the center of the fresnel concentric rings.
I said inner sweet spot in the foregoing paragraph - perhaps I should explain my perception of the Pimax 8KX lenses sharpness/acuity:
there is an inner sweet spot where you see 100% sharp details, it’s pretty small.
there is the outer sweet spot, let’s say 95% sharp, still quite okay but you do notice that it is not 100% sharp in comparison to the inner sweet spot. This one is pretty large, I would say it covers roughly 120° (with the small inner sweet spot included).
you’ve got the out of sweet spot area, which is comparable in acuity to what you would see on a Rift, Vive outside of their sweet spot - so already quite blurry, say 60%.
and then you’ve got what some consider the distortion area at the outer rim. For me it is often rather just very darkened but if I press the headset against my face it will be lighter but the view is horizontally stretched. If I can get it light I can’t be too bothered about it though because in games it is very unlikely that I would pay close attention, let alone focus on that peripheral area and I wouldn’t really notice it - but it can of course mean that a car being 2° within the 160° FoV may not be shown after all, if the stretching means that the last you can actually get visual information on is in truth only at say 155° but shown at 160° due to the stretching. I am sure someone will have figured this out, I am not too concerned about it, to me it is more of an ambilight effect anyhow at that kind of peripheral position. A serious simracer may care, I don’t know…
sometimes the false value is worse than not value at all as it can mislead & turn you around to the wrong directly & waste a lot of time & money.
pixels pattern indeed matters as I mentioned that some properties of TTLs can provide objective data, but there are a lot of confusion & misleading due to those video, colours reprojection is wrong, contrast is wrong, clarity is also wrong, it may provide some relative value to see the difference between og vive & newer HMDs but only for person who weared one of those, otherwise macro mod images look absoloutely awful & scare many people to try cheap HMDs, many just don’t need much, to play some beat saber after work & that’s it, but looking at that awful TTLs I wouldn’t buy e.g. OG vive, but actually it was a nice HMD & stil ok for some cases.
Chromatic abberations & sweetspot also can be partially analysed but it also can have a lot of errors & some reviewers shot it worse than in reality due to some reasons. I posted that Vive Pro video above to show that hyped people will see what they want to see, & if video has crisp image it’s not equal that clarity will be the same in percieved image, I believe the clarity for G2 is a case & it might be not a bad HMD, but apart of those things there are lot of others, like software, microsoft portal & the need to launch steamvr, if you want to use steamvr tracking you might have issues with the need to periodically adjust offsets between HMD & controllers as some WMR users reported periodically that it’s prone to go off of sync time by time & it annoys.
I didn’t try Artisan, but I guess it’s about the same as in 5k+, 5k+ has quite hight resolution image but the problem there is grid between pixels, it’s too prominent, SDE on Index is similar but they better hide those grid, on some HMDs grid is much less visible than on others while resolution & pixels per degree can be about the same & for some of ppl it’s too distractive. I personally find pentile on Vive Pro less distractive than grid on 5k+ even if 5k+'s resolution is bigger a bit (maybe its the same but there are more subpixels). But overall image on Viveo Pro looks consistent, e.g. on Index it’s too annoying (ripple & vertical lines + softness). Those little aspects are so important to not break your immersion depending on your personal bummers so I just have no idea how to get an idea how it will be perceived for you by looking at TTL videos. So common criteria nowadays is resolution, simple, the bigger is better + LCD vs OLED - OLED evil as it has no subpixels. And not least accord TTL videos played in this situation.
One good thing would be to remove “clarity” from de VR vocabulary
the quality of transparency or purity.
‘the crystal clarity of water’
synonyms: limpidity, limpidness, clearness, transparency, translucence, pellucidity, glassiness, purity, transpicuousness
I don’t think it’s the only info we can extract from those video. Tyriel wood has been very constant in the TTL video providing a comparison thru time of all the headsets not every one like you have 14 headsets to compare from
In some countries return policies are quite nice, so you can buy 1 thing & return it if you don’t like without shipping losses. Another option is to find options in your local area & go & check it yourself before purchase, unfortunately nowadays it’s more complicated due to the situation in the world. The point is that ppl due to TTLs believe that other hmds which they saw on those videos are worse & often never try those.
I guess there is a clarity vs. detail/acuity. The latter tells you how detailed and sharp a picture can be, while I suppose the former is used by some to describe how the headset feels in use, i.e. how often and for which percentage of your picture you actually can see clearly.
This is one of my current issues with the 8KX: I can see that sometimes the level of detail is very high, the picture is very clear, but only for this small inner sweet spot and only on one eye at a time.
Which means that I may see more detail on a given object when I move it into such a spot than with headset X, but possibly see a clearer overall picture with headset X over the entire scene.
If I don‘t get this resolved, my guess is that if not the Index, then the G2 will convince me personally more for my use because the picture & experience simply doesn‘t feel homogenous yet.
It might be that the Pimaxes don’t have individual distortion profiles per headset. Everything points towards that.
A distortion profile needs to get formed and applied per single unit. HTC, Oculus and Valve do this - and now HP as well it seems.
Source: Valve Developer
I’m on the mobile right now, so don’t ask for a link. Use Google, you’ll find it yourself. It’s the truth. He posted that on Twitter and was quoted in Reddit a few times.
I suspect this is the underlying problem with Pimaxes and why they are perceived so differently - it’s a lottery - because they don’t form a distortion profile per individual unit after assembly. That’s a big issue.
I suspect you are right, Kevin said something along the lines of that with the 8Kx they have tighter tolerances for the lenses than they had for other models. They realized a problem where small manufacturing variability was changing the headset experience from one unit to the next. Tighter tolerances are better but I wonder if that is enough in the long run.
Yeah indeed. It also explains why my 5K+ SN203 was bad, and the SN204 was good without distortion and eye-strain. The SN203 was probably built on a Monday at 8 in the morning, and the SN204 on a Wednesday at 11. 
Here, dug out the post:
That’s Alan Yates, the greybeard on lens wisdom.
It was posted together with this Advanced VR Rendering with Valve's Alex Vlachos - YouTube
here in a complaint thread on the Index for its excessive glare (which it has) : https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/ienv61/bad_lenses_ridiculous_levels_of_glare_streaking/
AFAIK Alan Yates is the man who designed and developed the lighthouse tracking. Which is not meant to diminish his impact or insight, just that I never heard about him working on optics.
According to a study I read years ago (about car manufacturing), the ones you really want to avoid are the ones built after 3pm on a Friday. 
Possible, but it won‘t be that alone. I‘ve had three Pimax headsets so far and the convergence issue, that it felt weird, gave me a cross-eyed sensation, was present basically with each of them.