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So the FOV is now up to 128 Horizontal
200-210 nits
650-850g
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This is deffo a contender for headset of the year if the release doesnāt slip, whatās all this crap I keep hearing about the developer is involved in some crypto scam, way above my pay grade but Iād be uncomfortable giving him money so I wonder if this will be available through Amazon & co.
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looks very very intresting!
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Looks extremely interesting. He says theyāre shooting for 2023 release but not sure how solid this is. But if they achieved all this goodness with 125+ horizontal FoV then this probably will be THE headset to buy this year.
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maybe hold your horses until you hear the price?
also as good as it may sound, there is still no real use case for eye- and hand-tracking in games in a way like some universal api and where its still optional (because only a minority has it)
we still have this with stuff for pimax 8k and 5k models but its not much use
but the concerning of the somnium headset might be the use of lighthouse when seeing it long term, as good as it is working its not meant to stay forever, its to impractical (needs mountig and cant be easiely moved) and expansive, valve never deliver on cheaper lighthouse and as they are mechanical systems they will deteriorate and malfunction after some time, addās way to much costs to the system
iām absolute sure the future belongs to what meta does, camās on headset and controller for inside out tracking, the quest pro controller are going to be the thing that will nail the coffin of lighthouse as it was the last thing where it had a advantage
and speaking of pimax above, they learned the lesson and selling of units now does not depend on valve anymore (and there highly individual way of defining time and need), qualcomm is going to be more reliable when it comes to a roadmap and new hardware genās
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Wholeheartedly disagreed on pretty much all points tbh.
Lighthouse tracking isnāt optional for my use case in a motion sim as I need motion compensation. I have had lighthouses ever since the OG Vive and had 0 failures. They are HDD motors after all. I currently have 4 BS2.0 set up and another 8 units for spares.
Eye-tracking is the minimum barrier for an enthusiast HMD since 2021. Using DFR via OpenXRToolKit for pretty much all titles I want is pretty damn close to universal.
As for the price point, Iām happy to shell out VR-3 or even XR-3 money if I feel it gives me a better experience.
Regarding Somnium, I dislike pretty much any and all Open Source approaches because I want a product and not a tinkering hobby. So that and the fact that their panel is below 3kx3k leaves me quite hesitant.
Still, if they do in fact achieve that FOV and at a proper ppd with as little distortion and CA as is technically possible, Iāll most likely get a unit just out of curiosity.
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thats a point i had not given much thought but isnāt there a new sensor that is camera based?
if you are not planing to mover your vr space into a barn then the amount of spares might shows that you have long term concerns, so at least one point we share 
(and we cant be sure if the next valve headset will still be using lighthouse - my guess would be that it will do camera based inside out tracking of its own but still bring BT (alike) features to keep the old controllers working with the new headset)
kind of high roller scenario even among vr enthusiasts
in a way what i meant/see, most vr devās will not comply to standards as it makes things more complicated and development takes longer, lets take a wide fov stuff as example there is still need for parallel projection
and the only platforms where where foviated rendering is a real thing (fixed or dynamic) are meta and psvr2 as both made it part of there ecosystem (and maybe will even be used without the devās explicitly activating it) - nothing like that on pc (steam) vr
i donāt think there will be much like that as the parts will be costly enough and the needed precision for 3d printing will be high, imho it will be very few ātinkerersā, if its good enough (high demand) there might be (questinable?) cheap chinese knockoffs
atm seems state of the art when it comes to ācheaperā headsets with more features (look what quest3 has) and its not just the display, if you go higher up in res you might need a better (more expansive) chipset in the headset to (and in case of standalone headset even more gpu power in the cpu/gpu chipset)
with all the optional parts mounting up (not just in price) it will be interesting to see how its doing against crystal - but i guess the real competition here might be bigscreen beyond (with its now better fov)
as we know from pimax there is more to it as that, if you dont get the mechnical setup right with the math and coding ā¦
also scaling up from a 1st production phase (a few hundred?) to more might be the most challenging step for Somnium, long supply chain as most parts might come from china and without good footage in that country (and it different ways of doing business) it can be way tougher then imagined
at least it looks interesting with what we have seen from CES and AES so far and the coming out of apple (also pushing others to make announcements of whats comming up withing 1 year)
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Iād say it was a non-sensical over-reaction when I first got my BS2.0s as I feared this exact scenario that still hasnāt materialised since 2019, under extended use.
But I agree that motion compensation is a niche requirement (Motion rigs) within the niche (simracing) of a niche (VR), so hardly a claim to a relevant use case. In that sub-niche, however, I havenāt yet found an equivalently low friction, high precision, no jitter and lag alternative.
As for high roller: yup 
I know at least @Djonko who shares and in many cases even exceeds my personally somewhat detached relationship to the monies.
Weāll see how the Somnium shapes up and what reviews say. If it becomes available via a reputable reseller Iāll probably give it whirl. It does share the screens with Crystal after all, and even if that HMD is now entirely outside my interest, I believe its panel quality has been praised unequivocally.
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its not getting as boring (and downward) with VR as some people expected it, still some interesting things to look forward to and apple entering VR (even if they dont say the word) is some movement
as for somnium, they will have a hard time as pimax and bigsceen seem ahead of them for about 6-8 month and pimax has by now some experience in production scale and ādevelopment after releaseā, bigscreen might have a point in simplicity of the hardware when it comes to scale up manufacturing, one helpful thing for Somnium is that pimax screwed up in horizontal fov (at best just on āoldā Index level), having about 15-20 degree more h-fov makes a difference
next surprise after apple might be valve and if they continue lighthouse tracking (the way it is now its hard to sell to ānormalā people)
also it will be interesting to see if pimax can really improve on lenses (and even fov as announced) with the 12k, atm it does not look like it with the crystal not achieving its advertised goals and keeping on a level thats 4 years old (what lamentable argumentation about having technical drawings from development that say it can do it when the final product clearly canāt - but i know that kind of thing, iām from former east germany and have seen socialism from the inside, they where always the best and never failed - right until the end)
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Canāt give you enough āheartsā for that post, particularly the last part. Spot on!
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Kind of ridiculous they are saying the VR1 will launch this year when there has not even been a public prototype yet, unless itās already done and they are keeping it secret.
Also wish it had a 72 or 75hz mode, thatās a big plus of the BB to me.
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I think weāre going to get news on the VR-1 pretty soon.
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cant wait!
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VR flight Sim Guy hinted heās going to try it out in Prague very soon and will have a video on it soon
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New Somnium VR1 Update:
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Considering Pimax crystal has way less fov crystal is way too big and too heavy for what it does
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Wow, quite an update. Itās looking more and more real. VERY curious about the price!
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