I hear you & the lottery commission seems to be ignoring my requests for a winning ticket. 
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I know Iām beating a dead horse here, but Pimax really needs to get their headstrap out ASAP. Comparing against the Index without a more comfortable headstrap with audio is not going to bode well.
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This wouldāve been such a disappointment for meā¦ Iād been thinking since they announced the CV1 how little adding extra vertical FOV added to the experience, compared to how much I (correctly) expected more horizontal FOV would.
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New updated and a more in depth look review of the Valve Index by RoadToVR:
Itās becoming increasingly clear that the Index is going to be the best of all the new gen headsets, regarding almost any aspect of such a piece of hardware, including the FOV (not counting the Pimaxās of course) with the only single exception of glare coming from lens, that is in any case on par with the competition, or close.
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They did not mention that it weights over 800 gramm heavy, I am not sure if this is really comfortableā¦
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The developer of Climbey have uploaded a couple of desktop mirror window gameplay videos the last few days, showing the (pre distortion) view for one eye (minus him apparently cropping the top and bottom, so it doesnāt become too slim a slice of visuals for the video), complete with the hidden area mask.
Looks like they have set the optics up to use a lot more of the corners, than with the Vive, with the natural side effect of the āinfamousā Vive ābite taken out of the screenā now appearing along all four edges, instead of just toward oneās nose ā also adds the nose cutout in the lenses to the mask.
Being conservative with the FOV really makes projection stretching toward the edges rather minimal. Forward seems to be one third-ish of the way into the 5Ā° canted screens. Iām not feeling confident making any estimations of what the field of view is exactly. :7
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If the weight distribution is right it shouldnāt really matter.
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Also still weights less than the HTC Vive Pro - which I havenāt heard complaints about but maybe someone with the Pro could give feedback on comfort?
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the pro is very comfy despite the weight
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The developer of H3VR said in his review that the Index is almost the most comfortable headset he ever had in his life, anything on the headset is adjustable and feels like it was enginereed carefully, he found close to nothing to complain about it, except that thereās still some glare coming from the lens, but itās less noticeable than previous gen Valve headsets in any case:
Edit: removed the link to video, duplicate linkā¦didnāt initially noticed it was already mentioned by @DrWilken 
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Deep dive into the valve indexes FOV
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Good article saw it on discord.
Gives possible explanation on why some have Eye strain while others donāt.
ā 1. The main downside of canting is that both the existing software content library and the field of GPU rendering hardware are all typically optimized for parallel eyes. Fortunately, this may be readily compensated for in software using the re-projection techniques we already depend on for maintaining a constant frame rate. We just need to do a tiny bit every frameā¦ This way, apps past, present, and future may continue rendering in parallel as they always have, and they will ājust workā for HMDs with mild amounts of cant angles.ā
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Yep itās also why Oculus hasnāt released Half Dome. It will require special rendering fix for games not designed for curve displays.
Thanks for the share. An interesting read with nice visualizations of what is going on. The article makes several good points about the canted panels. The only problem is that it is written by the marketing and so does not tell the complete truth.
Which is, it is pretty easy to get the FOV of the headset (vertical, horizontal, or diagonal), the one for which the headset is designed. The article is right in that knowing those design FOVs would not tell much about what the user actually sees because (as it poignantly mentions), what the user sees depends on other factors as well.
What the article does not say is that the design FOV is a pretty good measure of what the user can see - because it sets the limit - the user cannot see more, past the design FOV.
I believe that Index is a pretty good headset, where the designers, while apparently taking the similar route, with canted panels and such as Pimax, actually put a lot of thoughts into the different aspects - panels, lenses, view geometry, etc. - but the fact that it does not probably improve FOV much seems more and more apparent.
I just hope, once it gets out, someone will publish its geometry, because while there is nothing wrong about the user experience, the hard numbers cannot lie.
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This article finally describes in detail how complex the subject FoV, distortions etc. is. Thank you for sharing!
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We need Doc-Ok. 
Somebody had to say it - thanks for drawing any fire fromā¦ the less objective. :7
Also worth remembering that at the end of the day, the panels are still 8:9. :7
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Are they talking about Steam VR incorporating a form of parallel projection here for Index?
Or are they talking about an independent software solution?
It sounds like the former in which case is it possible it would work with Pimax or does need a HMD by individual case basis algorithm to function correctly?
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Itās maybe similar but not as complex to implement on the Index due to only having a 5Ā° canted.
What it demonstrates though that even Valve needed to implement a rendering correction for programs even with a mild canting.
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