Here’s a quote from VRfocus:
“The second feature of the TPCAST 2.0 technology is its scalability making it easy to adapt to any headset including 3k, 4k, and 8k video resolution HMDs in the market.”
Now Pimax can focus more on the headset instead of worrying about making the HMD wireless. Now, if only we can use that $100 voucher on the TPCAST 2.0…
Or maybe… just maybe… Since TPCAST has the audacity (we don’t know, if TPCAST is bluffing do we?) to say that it has completed a wireless solution for an 8K headset and they are practically Pimax’s next door neighbor on CES, why not borrow it, try to make it work and give people the chance to demo it?
Pimax have already stated the wireless would be from a third party, as is the eye tracking. I also don’t trust tpcast based on last year’s poor communication, poor and delayed release, required features not working and requiring third parties to get working. Maybe in time they can turn all that around with 2.0 and change my mind but so far they didn’t make the best impression.
I’m one of the admins on the TPCast discord where others than myself (let’s make that perfectly clear) managed to develop an alternative software to actually get the unit running reliably. They found an amazing amount of corner-cutting by TPCast in the process so for me personally, TPCast are incredibly unworthy of any sort of consumer trust and I am close to 100% sure that they are talking out of their asses regarding their ability to support higher res. They don’t even support the Vive’s or the Rift’s full resolution at this point!
Well, then. Let’s call them out by plugging the TPCAST 2.0 onto the Pimax 8K in CES and if you are right and they are bluffing, it will all be made clear as day.
You get a green line in the very periphery of your right eye on the Vive, and you get concave blue lines on both eyes on the Rift. Depending on your headshape you can notice them.
The entire unit is cobbled together from off the shelf components in TPCast’s race to be first-to-market.
Don’t get me wrong, I am very thankful for their efforts as everybody and their mom was telling the VR community that wireless would be YEARS away, and they kind of pulled it off.
It’s just that with known and big players such as Intel and DisplayLink now entering the market, I don’t intend to send another € in TPCast’s way.
Re calling them out on their bluff: look at the wording of their press release. They don’t say they can deliver a full-bandwidth wireless solution for 3K, 5K and 8K headsets. They say that TPCast 2.0 is ‘easy to adapt’ to those resolutions. So if you were to say, ‘alright, plug it in and let’s see’ they’ll tell you that this will be supported at some time in the future.
It’s the only way they can hope to stay relevant in the consumer’s mind with the Intel solution having been announced to support the Pro’s higher solution (which btw I’m still skeptical about as they didn’t show it. Nor did anyone show if the dual cameras will be supported in wireless mode. I expect they won’t, as we know exactly that the current Vive’s camera requires the sort of bandwidth and latency that no wireless protocol under the sun can offer bi-directionally at this point).
The problem with the intel displaylink solution is it needs a PCI-e card. It won’t work for laptops, right?
I thought adapting is a feature, as is the ability to drive 8K resolution. That’s why they don’t put 16K and 32K in as well. Am I wrong?
Personally, I won’t mind the green line at the very edge of the periphery, if it can handle pimax’s FOV and resolution. By the way, Pimax is supposedly 5K Resolution. If they can say that they can do 8K, maybe, 5K is very doable?
I know nothing of the Intel solution’s requirement for a PCIe interface on the PC side but I wouldn’t be surprised given the incredible amount of bandwidth required. Remember that not just the audio and visual signal needs to be transmitted at extremely low latency, but also the entire bi-directional communication that would normally run via USB. That’s the reason TPCast are using a router or apparently a USB dongle vor v2.0 as they separated those two required means of data transfer (60GHz for HDMI signal and 5Ghz for USB data).
If it’s true what TPCast are claiming regarding the support of 8K HMDs, they have developed a 60GHz solution outside of WirelessHD (which they used for TPCast 1.0) and WiGig (which Intel is using). I sincerely doubt they are capable of this, based on what I have been seeing for almost a year by now.
You may be right. But, still it won’t hurt to ask them Who knows, maybe they start getting a lot more competent since the last time you knew them. If they say, “well, 8k support is for the future”, then no problem. Maybe we can say that they shouldn’t bluff right now.
What I know is, I am currently using TPCAST for my Vive and it gives me great freedom, even though it can be a pain to install , have sucky instructions, and I have to restart my computer everytime (seriously. And I figured this out myself. Other people have different problems) for the HMD and other devices to be detectable by steamVR and also that dreadful green line.
For that freedom alone, it is worth asking TPCAST in CES, whether they are bluffing about the 2.0’s ability and test it out with the Pimax 8K
if pixmax is only getting 2,560 x 1,440 input resolution and then up-scaling inside the head set then tpcast should only need to send at 2,560 x 1,440 resolution correct?
@deletedpimaxrep1 would you guys be up for that? It’d be sort of the cream of the crop of small Chinese startups forming an alliance against HTC/Intel in the other corner. Could be fun!
Also, I now use two TPCasts for both Vive and Rift respectively, and having flashed them to OpenTPCast I love wireless VR and wouldn’t ever want to go back. It’s a HUGE improvement!
That is the input resolution per eye. So you need to double that number. It’ll give you a bandwidth figure that (as we know) cannot even be deliverd by one HDMI 2.0 cable, so let that sink in. It’s the reason Pimax went with DP1.3
Oh right… TPcast only uses 1 HDMI between the PC transmitter and the PC. I understand this as the bottleneck. But I suppose TPCAST 2.0 will not only use HDMI, if it claims that it can do 8K. Or 8K upscaled from 5K in VR language.
What if in TPCAST 2.0, it uses HDMI + USB 3.0 to connect the PC Transmitter to the PC (instead of just HDMI, as in the case of TPCAST 1.0? Can it handle 5K VR resolution wirelessly? I don’t care if it needs an extra router.
So it seems they are compressing it to get the higher res support
“The TPCAST 2.0 technology includes three main features. The first element is the ultra-low latency codec, capable of compressing VR content on a 50:1 ratio which significantly reduces the bandwidth required for video data transmission while bounding the latency to 1ms. This easy-to-use, stable, and ultra-low latency codec enables TPCAST’s product family to deliver consistently high-quality real-time video transmission. The second feature of the TPCAST 2.0 technology is its scalability making it easy to adapt to any headset including 3k, 4k, and 8k video resolution HMDs in the market. The third feature is the capability to preserve the user experience compared to a wired connection.”