I went to eBay. They had a 3080 for £820. I got that. Thanks, I'm so stoked.
3090 is the new VR KING
- Thread starter drkaii
- Start date
Question: Now that we have this nice leap in performance with Ampere and Big Navi; I'm once again looking into, flogging a kidney, and forking out for an XTAL ( basically because of their aspheric lenses ). I'm sick to death of buying headset after headset after headset; all of which have some crappy combination of FOV, resolution & sweet spot. Even on my G1 it feels like, 'the sweet spot', is just the manufacturers way of saying, 90% of the display is a blurry mess. The TRL screens I saw, even of the first XTAL, showed clear lens focus across, almost, the entire panel - there was no concept of 'sweet spot', if I recall correctly ( sweet zone, if I wanted to be really critical maybe ). I re-posted some shots here probably a year ago. When I watched the various Index, G1, 8KX, G2 TRL comparisons, several times I mistakenly thought the clearer display was the G2 when it was actually labelled G1 ( filming error? ) and the 8KX just gives a much much wider field of blur - why would I pay for that? IMO, HP should've put their panels into the Index rather than then Index lenses into the Reverb. Although then Valve might not be using HP's cheap wholesale manufacturing and logistics.
Sorry for the rant - I guess I'm just frustrated in what feels like being stuck on a plateau of overall display quality since the G1 landed; vendors just seem to keep cutting the compromises differently since then.
Given the XTAL lenses use most of the panel for clarity rather than just 12 pixels in the middle, does anyone happen to know if it's WMR/SteamVR compatible? I'm struggling to get comprehensive info from vrgineers site ( plus a few Internal Server errors from them ). BTW, before anyone jumps up and says 'yes' to SteamVR, there seems to be a caveat to this on the website where all they state is 'SteamVR ( OpenVR )' which, knowing my luck, means that there is probably one niche use case where it can run with SteamVR in SCO Linux, under the stairs, on Tuesdays.
I think I'd rather have headset with a wide FOV and most of the panel is good resolution & sharp-focus ( or very good for the XTAL 8K ) rather than yet another pair of ski googles where the clear part is smaller than my thumb. Maybe I'm just asking too much of retail headsets but I was severely disappointed by the G2 which should just be called the G1+ in my own, unqualified view. Ok, I'll have to save for a bit but as long as the retail headsets keep making most of their panels unreadable, I'll probably end up spending more than the £5000 on an XTAL, with yet more incremental upgrades. I've already spent enough to cover about 3/4s of an XTAL as it is and I suspect there are those of you who have spent the same, if not more.
I don't know am I just being spoiled or do others look at the current displays and think, come on and fix it already...
Sorry for the rant - I guess I'm just frustrated in what feels like being stuck on a plateau of overall display quality since the G1 landed; vendors just seem to keep cutting the compromises differently since then.
Given the XTAL lenses use most of the panel for clarity rather than just 12 pixels in the middle, does anyone happen to know if it's WMR/SteamVR compatible? I'm struggling to get comprehensive info from vrgineers site ( plus a few Internal Server errors from them ). BTW, before anyone jumps up and says 'yes' to SteamVR, there seems to be a caveat to this on the website where all they state is 'SteamVR ( OpenVR )' which, knowing my luck, means that there is probably one niche use case where it can run with SteamVR in SCO Linux, under the stairs, on Tuesdays.
I think I'd rather have headset with a wide FOV and most of the panel is good resolution & sharp-focus ( or very good for the XTAL 8K ) rather than yet another pair of ski googles where the clear part is smaller than my thumb. Maybe I'm just asking too much of retail headsets but I was severely disappointed by the G2 which should just be called the G1+ in my own, unqualified view. Ok, I'll have to save for a bit but as long as the retail headsets keep making most of their panels unreadable, I'll probably end up spending more than the £5000 on an XTAL, with yet more incremental upgrades. I've already spent enough to cover about 3/4s of an XTAL as it is and I suspect there are those of you who have spent the same, if not more.
I don't know am I just being spoiled or do others look at the current displays and think, come on and fix it already...
You want to spend £6k on a VR headset to play games with? Why don't you just take the lenses to a place and get them remade how you want them?
I remember VoodooDE playing Project Cars 2 with an XTAL HMD a couple of years ago so its definitely either implementing the OpenVR interface natively in its driver or has a proxy that wraps calls to the SteamVR implementation similar to WMR.
Good question - I gather ( and correct me if I'm wrong ), there are a number of issues with that approach ( otherwise everybody would already have done it ) :-
1. Fresnel lenses approximate spheric/aspheric lenses in order to reduce volume and weight. If we put proper aspheric lenses in, how would they fit into the headset? XTAL is large compared with even the Pimax headsets.
2. From what I gather, the image rendering is distorted so that the 'distortion' caused by the fresnel lens turns it into what we expect to see and the fresnel lens is designed for the sweet-spot which is small. Who's going to write the new WMR drivers for the various prototypes and then final custom lens? VRgineers certainly aren't going to release the algorithm for their lenses because it's proprietary and that would be the end of their business because then the big manufacturers can do it more cheaply.
3. So I have to pay someone to try and design lenses, someone to write the code, someone to figure out the algorithm and then someone to provide software and hardware to support the modified headset for as long as I have it, keep it uptodate with WMR, Steam etc.
Might I humbly assert that ( a ) It will have cost alot more to pay those people to do the work with no idea how long it will take from inception to a working ( reliably ) headset with all the Design/Dev/Build sprint cycles ( I reckon a year at least to a 'final' version ) or ( b ) I can just pay £6k and all that faff is done already - And it's supported.
It's an interesting idea wickfut, however I'm going to guess it wouldn't be a more practical approach to try and engineer lenses.
That shed some light, thanks. It sounds like I'm probably looking too soon and it's still bleeding edge. I think I need to do some more digging into specific examples or try to cosy up to the Dev's. I'm not forking out 'car' money to be a test case.
Do you know how to remove a kidney, will that be enough? Maybe a lung.
Looks like you will need to take up weights as well to strengthen your neck so you can use it for long VR sessions
Wait what? I thought for £6k it would come with someone to massage my neck the whole time...Looks like you will need to take up weights as well to strengthen your neck so you can use it for long VR sessions
Heh, I have a pair of regular 72mm photography close-up lenses (glass), that I had for "fun" sandwiched, one +4 and one +10, in a 3d-printed cup -- let's call it something of a "lupe", to put it on top of a tablet, to see how things would look...
Anyway; I had two such pairs, and later printed a silly binocular-like contraption (still much weaker magnification than HMD lenses, even with double lenses) that grafted those lenses onto my Pimax 8kX (regular lenses plucked out), and actually even managed to play some games for a while with it, in spite of the completely mismatched projection and distortion compensation (there was a degree or two in the middle, where things kind of lined up, before the left and right image diverged too much for the brain to compensate), but indeed: Four large and heavy glass lenses, plus the weight of the HMD, but now offset with an extra 7cm of leverage; You could say there was some protestations from the neck department - /me is not exactly the Rock.
Damned if it didn't look crisp, though. :7
I reckon that with a bit more tinkering you could have yourself a market there - I'd buyHeh, I have a pair of regular 72mm photography close-up lenses (glass), that I had for "fun" sandwiched, one +4 and one +10, in a 3d-printed cup -- let's call it something of a "lupe", to put it on top of a tablet, to see how things would look...
Anyway; I had two such pairs, and later printed a silly binocular-like contraption (still much weaker magnification than HMD lenses, even with double lenses) that grafted those lenses onto my Pimax 8kX (regular lenses plucked out), and actually even managed to play some games for a while with it, in spite of the completely mismatched projection and distortion compensation (there was a degree or two in the middle, where things kind of lined up, before the left and right image diverged too much for the brain to compensate), but indeed: Four large and heavy glass lenses, plus the weight of the HMD, but now offset with an extra 7cm of leverage; You could say there was some protestations from the neck department - /me is not exactly the Rock.
Damned if it didn't look crisp, though. :7
I remember it well !!!
Later on we all modded our Vive Pros with Samsung Gear aspheric lenses and that was amazing although the distortion correction was a bit wonky in places.
Still, it was a thing of beauty at the time considering the insane god rays on the stock lenses.
Ages spent in ED honing the contrast and gamma settings of the Rift to minimise the god rays, while keeping the galaxy looking OK. It was all a compromise. My HP G2 is coming next week and I dare say that will have compromises too.
Until it's time to drop that £6k on the headset and you have to weigh up if a new Samsung OLED is just around the corner with a higher res for £450.
You won't get an XTAL. Or if you do you'd regret it within a year.
Joking aside; Had I the skills, and the resources, and the time, I would try to botch together an HMD for myself, using those unsuited lenses, even though it would be huge, and clumsy (two 14x14cm screens, to fill the potential FOV), and exhibit a ton of pupil swim. :7
Judging by reviews I have see, the omission of a mechanism for adjusting eye relief seems to be a very ill-chosen cost/weight/complexity reduction measurement -- many seem to wind up way too far from the lenses, resulting in a suboptimal experience, and few sound willing to do any facial interface modding, to mitigate that.
Then again; Every consumer version Oculus headset have suffered the same design decision, so they're in good company, I guess... :7
I did notice that on a review video, when the guy mentioned there was no problem wearing glasses in the G2. Hopefully there will be a faceplate made for people who don't need that much distance from the lenses.
If they want to keep things simple and light, they could at least include foam gaskets of a few different thicknesses and shapes in the box -- maybe some well chosen assortment of segments you could combine like onion layers, to build up, or reduce in spots, where needed.
( The original HTC Vive came with two foam gaskets, for wide or narrow faces, but I don't think I've seen it since; Even my expensive Valve Index squeezes my cheekbones from the side, and the only way to deal with this is by DIY. Pimax ostensibly began to ship their headsets with a thin and a thick gasket, after years of complaints, but I got only the one thin one, with my 8kX, :7 )