Hi Guys,
I'm sure others have already reviewed some WMR (windows mixed reality) headsets, but I thought of chipping in too, so here it comes.
Let me start by openly saying that I didn't expect Lenovo to replace my Vive or Oculus (I have both for testing purposes) and I did expect quite few bugs.. You can imagine my surprise ....
I'll start with the down sides first:
a)Lenovo has smaller sweet spot and no mechanicaly adjustable IPD, so if your IPD is between 61-65 you should be fine (mine is 65), but if you are beyond 67+ I would recommend checking out other headsets (Oculus,Vive,Samsung), however for me with IPD at 65 I don't have a problem with finding and seeing through the sweetspot after I set my IPD in the windows settings. (I would say that the sweet spot behavior is very similar to PSVR, so if you have PSVR to hand or can test in your nearby shop you will be able to see if you can enjoy this setup)
b)Blacks - It is an LCD screen and while I can not see any blurring, the blacks are darkest grey possible, but still grey. This isn't a problem for high contrast games/well lit games, but becomes a slight issue in ED (there are ways to improve things which I mention later) However one thing I didn't notice in ED on Lenovo is black smearing which is amazing - Oculus in particular was terrible with black smearing and this awful artifacting is simply not there in Lenovo...
- That is it, those are the only negatives I could find at the moment (Bugs or technical issues are something I get back to at the end, but there are no game breaking issues I have noticed)
So lets get to positives -
a)The headset is superbly light and comfortable for hours and hours of gameplay (actually makes me wish I had more then an hour a day to play). The PSVR head band style used in Lenovo is much more comfortable then Vive ( Deluxe Audio strap on Vive makes things a bit better, but Lenovo still beats it hands down in my opinion) and even more comfortable then Oculus. There is no need to overtighten things and you just place the mask on your face and drop the head band and tighten by a point or two... that is it... No more fussing around with straps... This is also great if you have friends over as they can easily try VR
b) Screen door effect (SDE) is almost gone and God rays are not noticeable. Currently the Vive has worst SDE (in my opinion) followed by Oculus. Oculus also has amazing Bloom like God Rays that are more then just a slight annoyance... Clarity of text is a huge issue in VR and in ED I'm finally able to leave the default GUI colours and enjoy the game with readable text and clarity in my Lenovo which the other headsets just can't deliver without heavy handed SuperSampling.
c) ease of use and setup - Lenovo is clear winner here - I run the setup and that is it. It just works...
d) Only 1 USB3 and One HDMI port occupied to enjoy full 360 room scale VR. Compared to Vive it won't even take up an electrical socket. With Oculus you will probably run into USB shortage if you simply run the two sensor setup, but you will almost certainly end up buying a PCI-e USB card if you want to do room scale and still have joystics or any other dongles plugged in, so yeah... Lenovo is again a clear winner together with Vive.
e) Ironically I had less problems and bugs setting this up then with Oculus (Vive setup was in my opinion quite easy and I found Steam VR to be rather stable compared to Oculus Home). Oculus seems to be in infinite Beta state. Their Home app is still to leave Beta and I generally found that Nvidia Drivers/Windows Updates/ Oculus Home updates have terrible tendency to break Oculus and require far too much time tweaking to get it back up and running... in my experience Vive and Lenovo both seem to be more reliable at delivering more stable software setup then Oculus and that is rather surprising considering the fact that WMR headsets have Steam Support for such a short while and are still officially in Beta.
Bugs and Crashes:
I had 2 Crashes in the whole time ... Updating the drivers to Nvidia has stopped them and each of these crashes happened when I had a lot more apps opened in WMR... Sometimes I get a frame stuttering when I launch ED, but this disappears in a minute or two and then it doesn't reappear again - probably stuff needed for WMR launching in the background when ED is already loaded. To Open ED I simply open the Launcher and press Launch. WMR and Steam VR support automatically open and I can put the headset on and enjoy gaming.
Install setup used to play ED:
I've installed Windows Mixed reality as instructed in the manual. I've installed Mixed Reality support in Steam and my ED was already installed and set to VR (played on Vive previously). In ED I play with VR Ultra Preset (blur off and HMD SS at 1.25 as well as game SS at 1.25 ) This gives me amazing clarity and frame rate without stutters (my card is GTX 1080 slightly overclocked)
Final thoughts and help with Blacks:
I really like Lenovo and it lead to me boxing up my Vive and Oculus for the time being.. I will keep them for our internal projects and testing, but I have little to no intention for using them in my gaming sessions. I've also spent time testing the hand controllers and while they are not as ergonomic as Oculus touch they are clearly better then Vive wands (even thought they are very plastic) and they seem to be tracked really well as well - Tested in Robo Recall and few other games..
Changing these settings has helped me to achieve better contrast - If anybody knows how to increase the saturation as well please let me know as Maybe that could be something else that could be of help, but kudos to horizone as his changes to gamma curve also help for the Lenovo
I'm sure others have already reviewed some WMR (windows mixed reality) headsets, but I thought of chipping in too, so here it comes.
Let me start by openly saying that I didn't expect Lenovo to replace my Vive or Oculus (I have both for testing purposes) and I did expect quite few bugs.. You can imagine my surprise ....
I'll start with the down sides first:
a)Lenovo has smaller sweet spot and no mechanicaly adjustable IPD, so if your IPD is between 61-65 you should be fine (mine is 65), but if you are beyond 67+ I would recommend checking out other headsets (Oculus,Vive,Samsung), however for me with IPD at 65 I don't have a problem with finding and seeing through the sweetspot after I set my IPD in the windows settings. (I would say that the sweet spot behavior is very similar to PSVR, so if you have PSVR to hand or can test in your nearby shop you will be able to see if you can enjoy this setup)
b)Blacks - It is an LCD screen and while I can not see any blurring, the blacks are darkest grey possible, but still grey. This isn't a problem for high contrast games/well lit games, but becomes a slight issue in ED (there are ways to improve things which I mention later) However one thing I didn't notice in ED on Lenovo is black smearing which is amazing - Oculus in particular was terrible with black smearing and this awful artifacting is simply not there in Lenovo...
- That is it, those are the only negatives I could find at the moment (Bugs or technical issues are something I get back to at the end, but there are no game breaking issues I have noticed)
So lets get to positives -
a)The headset is superbly light and comfortable for hours and hours of gameplay (actually makes me wish I had more then an hour a day to play). The PSVR head band style used in Lenovo is much more comfortable then Vive ( Deluxe Audio strap on Vive makes things a bit better, but Lenovo still beats it hands down in my opinion) and even more comfortable then Oculus. There is no need to overtighten things and you just place the mask on your face and drop the head band and tighten by a point or two... that is it... No more fussing around with straps... This is also great if you have friends over as they can easily try VR
b) Screen door effect (SDE) is almost gone and God rays are not noticeable. Currently the Vive has worst SDE (in my opinion) followed by Oculus. Oculus also has amazing Bloom like God Rays that are more then just a slight annoyance... Clarity of text is a huge issue in VR and in ED I'm finally able to leave the default GUI colours and enjoy the game with readable text and clarity in my Lenovo which the other headsets just can't deliver without heavy handed SuperSampling.
c) ease of use and setup - Lenovo is clear winner here - I run the setup and that is it. It just works...
d) Only 1 USB3 and One HDMI port occupied to enjoy full 360 room scale VR. Compared to Vive it won't even take up an electrical socket. With Oculus you will probably run into USB shortage if you simply run the two sensor setup, but you will almost certainly end up buying a PCI-e USB card if you want to do room scale and still have joystics or any other dongles plugged in, so yeah... Lenovo is again a clear winner together with Vive.
e) Ironically I had less problems and bugs setting this up then with Oculus (Vive setup was in my opinion quite easy and I found Steam VR to be rather stable compared to Oculus Home). Oculus seems to be in infinite Beta state. Their Home app is still to leave Beta and I generally found that Nvidia Drivers/Windows Updates/ Oculus Home updates have terrible tendency to break Oculus and require far too much time tweaking to get it back up and running... in my experience Vive and Lenovo both seem to be more reliable at delivering more stable software setup then Oculus and that is rather surprising considering the fact that WMR headsets have Steam Support for such a short while and are still officially in Beta.
Bugs and Crashes:
I had 2 Crashes in the whole time ... Updating the drivers to Nvidia has stopped them and each of these crashes happened when I had a lot more apps opened in WMR... Sometimes I get a frame stuttering when I launch ED, but this disappears in a minute or two and then it doesn't reappear again - probably stuff needed for WMR launching in the background when ED is already loaded. To Open ED I simply open the Launcher and press Launch. WMR and Steam VR support automatically open and I can put the headset on and enjoy gaming.
Install setup used to play ED:
I've installed Windows Mixed reality as instructed in the manual. I've installed Mixed Reality support in Steam and my ED was already installed and set to VR (played on Vive previously). In ED I play with VR Ultra Preset (blur off and HMD SS at 1.25 as well as game SS at 1.25 ) This gives me amazing clarity and frame rate without stutters (my card is GTX 1080 slightly overclocked)
Final thoughts and help with Blacks:
I really like Lenovo and it lead to me boxing up my Vive and Oculus for the time being.. I will keep them for our internal projects and testing, but I have little to no intention for using them in my gaming sessions. I've also spent time testing the hand controllers and while they are not as ergonomic as Oculus touch they are clearly better then Vive wands (even thought they are very plastic) and they seem to be tracked really well as well - Tested in Robo Recall and few other games..
Changing these settings has helped me to achieve better contrast - If anybody knows how to increase the saturation as well please let me know as Maybe that could be something else that could be of help, but kudos to horizone as his changes to gamma curve also help for the Lenovo
The Rift Gamma curve is a lot brighter than a normal monitor in the dark range which is bad for space games. Some of the mood is lost.
Some of this is due to the fact that we are blocking out all other light in an HMD and some of it is because Oculus OLED panels have somewhat low fidelity in the dark range which Oculus have compensated for with a non-standard (too bright to what we're used to) gamma curve.
Now with the new dithering Frontier have added to Elite, we don't get sharp edges in dark colours anymore so why not take this opportunity and tweak the game's gamma curve (for the Rift only) just a little.
To get rid of the too bright greyish gas/dust clouds (you see them 2000Ls out from stars when not facing the core) and make them more blue and darker (more like how it would look on a regular monitor), change the following values in your GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml.
Location: C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Graphics
Code:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <GraphicsConfig> <HDRNode_Reference> <ToeDenominator>0.2050</ToeDenominator> <ToeStrength>0.2300</ToeStrength> </HDRNode_Reference> <!-- Your HUD colours here if you have any --> </GraphicsConfig>
If you change ToeDenominator down to 0.2000 it will get even darker if you prefer that. Don't go below 0.2000. It affects more than the galaxy background of course.
This is only to tweak the Rift more towards correctness. I do not encourage wild experimentation with these settings. In some thread I saw devs recommended against changing these values so it's on your own risk. Your luck with this may vary since different Rifts can differ somewhat in brightness I think.
Oh, and please keep this thread to be for correcting the Rift to look more towards monitor, not making crazy out-there changes or non-rift tweaks.
Disclaimer: I don't know too much about color correction so no super hi-tech questions please. I just want Elite to be better in the Rift.
EDIT: This is just a nudge at the settings, don't expect any day and night differences, especially if you are already satisfied with your image quality. Some people might not see the difference if they don't do a A-B comparison.
EDIT 2: Make sure your in-game gamma slider is at default. Have not tried anything else.
