Actually I regret selling mine. I’m sure these things will be worth a lot of money one day! Only very limited amounts were produced and sold, I’m sure.
About the demo, yeah I still have it. If @cr4zyw3ld3r wants it, send me a PM. I found it quite mindblowing. Too bad the resolution on this headset feels so outdated. The FoV is just so good, to me it felt WAY better than the Pimax headsets, since there you still feel like watching through a (distorted) skimask. With StarVR it felt for the first time I was really there, in the scene. Crazy.
Indeed, this reminds me a bit of the Razer OSVR HDK2 with its multi-element lens and the Panasonic 270* fused lens headset prototype that came out a bit back. The lenses on the HDK were amazing, no godray effect, no mura no weird halos like you get on any other headsets, supposedly the Vive Pro 2 also has a similar lens design but I think they are still fresnel. However the Panasonic design had a very clear delineation line that separated the two lenses and when you looked at them through a camera you could see exactly where the two meet and it seemed very distracting, and I do hope that if they do a fused design they use the materials used in those new folding phone screens so that you cannot tell where the two lenses are attached.
Seems you got one of the good units. Many people here suffered from the display defects (grainy image). I was lucky that the business manager from StavrVR came to visit me at my home and when I tested her unit I noticed mine was defective (she took my unit to the HQ. She had it changed for me. But we all had the same problem here at the forum.
These units will be part of history. Lionel Anton(StarVR creator) then I were early developers of wide FOV headsets back in 2013. Definitely having a good core team and some funds help a lot. I love my unit for sure. I think if Acer got involved more in the venture with solid funding, a better iteration could have been released.
I have not tried it outside of steamVR just yet as one of my base stations just kicked the bucket and it seems there is a long wait from Valve to get them, something I did not anticipate but probably should have. However I used the max resolution trick that @NextGenVR suggested in one of his forum posts from when he still had his unit and it absolutely clears up the image. I feel like normally there is a bit a vaseline effect to the overall picture. I suppose I should have specified this first and foremost. But even the 3090 struggles at this resolution. I tried Boneworks and the reprojection kicked in far too often, Alyx seemed to work a lot better, but I was def still getting a lot of dropped frames. Hopefully I get my base station soon, not really too stoked on dropping $230 on one used after I just spent $3200 for the HMD but time will tell. Now I am also starting to wonder if the strap seen here is exclusive to the XT models only, because I have not seen it used on too many other models even demo units StarVR announced at E3 2015, a high-end VR headset by Starbreeze | VG247
The Vaseline effect wasn’t the issue. That was on all starvrs. The image you showed was an earlier development unit. The XT has some minor changes. I have one unit. The strap is similar to the old rift and vive. Nothing fancy,.the one in your unit is better
Indeed I have no issue with the strap that came with my unit but curious about that cross-over design because I had a similar strap in my AR headset the DreamGlass 2K had this tilting headstrap with the adjustment from the back and the bottom of the head and it was very balanced and comfortable. It seems to me that the Varjo VR units employ a variation of the this mechanism. I might be reading too much into it but it seems like it would make for a very stable platform especially if you are moving around!
That top head strap was added I think before Starbreeze acquired it and the HMD was called Infiniteye. It was very rudimentary at the time. Incidentally other companies adopted similar design, like the Sony PS VR
It is similar in a way to the PSVR in terms of the back ratchet but it also has a second ring that goes over the head more similar to a welder’s helmet in terms of how it sits. So where the PSVR has a traction oval on the front/top of your head there is not a second oval around the back of your head which this unit had. That link i posted has the only pics i found of the real headset vs renders.
Also I now see that per this post Unreal Engine 4 only has support for canted displays since eng ver 4.18 so its possible older VR titles may not work well with it at all. I will need to do some tests since the Showdown demo was released in 2015 predating the 2017 release of 4.18 so I will need to see if they used a local file that works with StarVR to make it work.
So I managed to do some more testing after cracking open my broken base station, turns out a three prong connector came undone. using the MelonLoader and culling fix for BoneWorks does not actually fix the edge culling as I had expected. Pistol Whip seems to be just fine even without the same Unity Culling Fix. Lone Echo and Pistol Whip did not particularly enjoy my max resolution tweak which also adds 500SS as that tanks the FPS in those titles curiously BoneWorks and FO4VR did not seem to be affected by this tweak outside the obvious clarity to the overall image. However FO4 suffers from odd shader behavior, something that seems to be fixed with PP for the Pimax folks in some cases however others have reported switching to an older ver of the game exe, in my case the older ver of the exe caused the eyes to have the same pic rendered as far as I could tell however it did resolve the shader issue. Something wonky happening within the engine and the way the shader passes work I suppose, will need to do more digging and test Skyrim next. Asseto Corsa seems to work without tweaks but I will need to try out Rfactor2 and the Dirt Rally series to see how those do.
StarVR worked with some developers of racing games which would explain why you didnt have issues with asseto.
There is something to keep in mind, StarVR didnt develop the headset and software specifically for gaming. The software is very rough and feels incomplete. A lot had to do that the core dev team leaving a year prior to the headset release. The team remaining were likely more of a support team rather than actual developers. You will likely have to find your own way to solve problems on specific titles of interest.
This was my expectation from the get-go, luckily a number of tools exist for edge case HMDs nowadays so i can definitely piece things together until they work. So far in Unreal and in Solidworks it is pretty damn impressive.
The “Showdown” full source code was released in 2015: Showdown Cinematic VR Experience Released for Free! - Unreal Engine. The StarVR developers seized that opportunity and modified that source code to optimize it for the StarVR and that resulted in that demo that I’ve sent you per PM. So it’s really different from the original Showdown project that you can find in the Oculus store.
I still don’t understand what they exactly did, but it just looks and feels SO much better than any other (non StarVR specific) content I threw at my StarVR … Some speculated they render more viewports and that that was was made it look and feel so awesome.
That (starVR optimized) Showdown demo is still the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen in VR. Sure, the Varjo VR3 demo’s look stunning too, for its ultra high resolution, but because of the limited FoV (and distortion) you still are very much aware that you’re using a VR headset. With that distortion free, ultra wide FoV Showdown demo I really felt like I was there.
Maybe @lionel will one day reveal the secret, though chances are small since he never returned to the forum anymore …
The device measured me at 60 but I cannot seem to align the crosshairs everytime so its hit or miss. Interestingly my VIVE and the Odyssey+ had me at 64 but for one reason on another that value on the StarVR makes me see double. @Djonko yes the Showdown demo is surprisingly insane. I mean I was expecting it to just look neat because I have seen it in VR before but this certainly feels next level. Just really goes to show what the OG dev team was capable of. It also means that should someone pick up on their dynamic distortion profile for future HMDs that could be the game changer for these headsets. Though I have a feeling we will def need to see the chiplet tech mature in GPUs so we could get the frames needed to really drive the next gen headsets at high res or they need to start using that AI algo that upscales engine output from lets say 2K to 8k using the motion vector and Z buffer approach that occulus debuted recently because having seen that demo I trust with a bit more dev we could be having insane resolution even on the current crop of GPUs to drive high PPI displays in VR but they need to start also taking multi GPU affinity more seriously esp now that we have resizable BAR and good bandwidth across the PCIe bus.
So it looks like the new Pimax QLED display is also leveraging Tobii so now I am curious if they will also go down the road of dynamic distortion profile adjustment.
One thing is though and I do not know if this impacts all games with Pimax units as well or if its just my headshape however I do seem to notice frustrum culling quite a bit with this HMD. Normally its not an issue but at this fov it is definitely distracting. Even with some fixes in place it seems shipped binaries are not well optimized for this which is curious because at least in both Unreal Editor and Unity this is a non issue when the FoV is set correctly granted I am using the latest ver of both, though I have yet to test drive the plugin in Unreal 5 to see if it works.
The StarVR doesn’t need Tobii to fix the distortion. The Tobbi is mainly used to have higher fidelity rendering at the section your eyes are looking to. Pimax distortion is created due to the lenses design and the software coordination to the lenses. Could Tobii help, sure if the programers can make a dynamic warp fix and that will require more computation, basically more of a hit to CPU or GPU
Well the CPU hit seems like it should not be a bad thing esp considering the modern CPUs are quite powerful. But wasn’t the eye tracking meant to be implemented by the software devs? I vaguely recall that it is not something that is on unless implemented by the software though memory could be failing me on this.