Meta's lineup isn't a fair comparison IMO, since those include significant compute power to a actually run the software, battery, inside out tracking, and are completely untethered, all for about half of what this costs. This is a tethered display that relies on separate controllers, lighthouses, and computation.
That said, lightweight is awesome. I think getting weight out of the headset is going to be really important for any sort of casual use of VR, but I don't think this product is good example of that, just because of all the other requirements.
It's not very likely anyone will offer a privacy conscious VR product, at least any more than we have now. You can run a relatively "Open" VR stack with Proton and Linux, but that's not really marketable to major audiences. Even selling it to Windows users didn't really work.
The last chances of a truly privacy-respecting VR experience dried up when "The Industry" walked away from OpenXR and other efforts to treat VR like a first-class technology and not a toy. Maybe not the worst choice in hindsight, but it's also the one that lead us down this road of "product-ized" virtual reality.
There is a big difference between Facebook having cameras inside your house and someone like Valve. We know that Valve makes money primarily from software sales, whereas Facebook's core business is collecting user data for targeted advertising, so you know they will taking advantage of every camera and microphone you give them. Facebook also has a terrible ethical history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
> "- Does not come with controllers or trackers (compatible with existing lighthouses, bring your own)"
This feels like a dealbreaker for me, and I should be firmly in the target demo for this product (PC VR user, flight sim enjoyer) - putting up Lighthouses on my walls so I can do some basic VR gaming is IMO a pretty tall order.
There's a really good reason inside-out tracking has practically fully displaced stuff that requires you to install new stuff in a room.
I have a vive, and my lighthouses are on collapsible tripods that sit in corners of my living room when i'm playing. Takes ~5 min of time to set both up, point them in the right direction, and setup room boundaries in Steam. Works really well, if you prefer to do it that way! I think I would still prefer inside-out tracking, but I have very specific reasons for only using the Vive, so that's what I'm stuck with. I think it's a problem that can easily be overcome if you're interested in this headset, without having to drill holes into walls! It's definitely an extra expense though.
However, if their whole goal was "smallest lightest headset" then you can't really blame them for removing every single piece of tech from the headset they possibly could and outsourcing it to another device to maintain that claim. The right call? I dunno. But if this headset can be a drop-in replacement for my Vive one, I will buy the hell out of that. It's a strict upgrade for me with basically no extra expenditure of effort/money beyond the cost of the headset.
> "However, if their whole goal was "smallest lightest headset" then you can't really blame them for removing every single piece of tech from the headset they possibly could and outsourcing it to another device to maintain that claim."
Sure you can - IMO (and of course reasonable minds can disagree) - you can surely blame a product when they've optimized to the point of going below-MVP.
I get the desire to be smaller and lighter than the rest, but IMO inside-out is table stakes and is part of the "minimum viable" requirement...
I've seen the portable lighthouse setups, but IMO that's even worse. I've done the lighthouse setup back when it was I had the Oculus CV1 - and those didn't even need to be positioned high on the walls, and IMO it was a huge pain the ass. I think I ended up using them a total of 5 times because of how much fiddling was required to get into VR.
PCVR is already a vanishingly small market, this particular quirk of the spec IMO puts the product below minimum viability.
This is a relatively small company, and this I think is their first foray into hardware. It makes sense they are targeting a niche market (PC VR users who already have a steamVR headset). Specifically, they are a company that makes Bigscreen VR, a desktop mirroring app. A lot of people bought Indexes, or Vives, and this is a possible sidegrade to those, especially if you are interested in the idea of "VR virtual desktops", which seems to be the entire point of this headset, with very high resolution and extremely low weight, and not even a 3.5mm jack for headphones.
Yeah I have lighthouses set up for my Vive and for gaming would only consider lighthouse-based tracking for any future headsets (I've tried inside-out for stuff like Beat Saber and it's night and day), but for casual movie watching or virtual desktop use it's definitely a tall order.
I think for the "casual" use cases it might be possible to get away with a single lighthouse (~$100) and no controllers (stick to keyboard/mouse, console controller, or HOTAS) but that's pushing it.
For me, wires are terrible for Beat Saber much more so than the loss in tracking. I did have the wireless HTC attachment, but that had its own issues, so I primarily use a Quest 2 now despite having a full lighthouse setup.
You can buy light house compatible controllers from either Valve or HTC
Lighthouses are a pain to install and configure just right. However, it’s also the most accurate tracking system to date and it makes full body tracking possible.
Cheap camera tripods or lighthouse holders make it much easier to deal with
Inside out tracking is good for casual games, but you miss out on a lot of the experience in more in depth games. Lighthouses are also super easy to setup on tripods.
In what way? Most implementations of inside out do have controller tracking limitations due to body occlusion, but Quest Pro's controllers (which track themselves) suffer even less from this problem than Lighthouse does. Granted, it's expensive and a bit buggy, but it's a first generation implementation and it's not difficult to predict a revision that uses custom silicon instead of using a smartphone SoC per controller.
From my experience, only WMR had really terrible inside out tracking where it would make the value proposition of lighthouses obvious. Quest inside out tracking is good though.
The main advantage light houses offer is that it makes full body tracking possible, assuming people are willing to pay for 2-3 extra trackers AND more developers start supporting it. As of right now, I am only aware of 3-5 games and apps that support full body tracking.
Not really. They're qualitatively the same product: a head mounted binocular USB-C display with accelerometers/gyros. It's much easier to make such a thing than a full tracking VR system. If this is a VR headset, then so is the LG R100.
(Admittedly this product does include lighthouse sensors, slightly reducing the amount of third party equipment you need to implement a 6dof system.)
IMU-based and lighthouse-based 6DOF tracking are so far apart in fidelity that the LG R100 is unusable for anything beyond watching videos and I wouldn’t consider it a real player in the VR space.
I do believe one of the reasons VR has been slow to gain traction is because of the bulkiness/awkwardness of the headsets. This definitely takes care of the weight, but it still looks ridiculous. I don't foresee people sitting on the train wearing these.
The right headset is around the corner, but this isn't it.
But on a long-distance train or a long plane flight? I could totally see people reclining and wearing this to watch TV and movies.
(Honestly, the gigantic IMAX-sized cinema screen in VR is kind of the killer app nobody is talking about. Not to mention it's the highest quality 3D movie experience you can get, if you want to watch something like Avatar.)
Obviously nobody's going to be playing games on a VR headset on public transportation, at least not ones that require moving controllers in space.
I actually asked for experiences of people with VR headsets for movie watching. No one said they would recommend it. I was kind of surprised. Do you think they are good for that use case?
They're amazing. You really need to have the right software though.
I've got a Quest 2, and the app to use is Skybox, and I watch stuff over SMB on my local NAS. The key things are being able to adjust the size of the screen and the angle of the screen. I can literally lie on my back on bed and watch TV on the ceiling. And the visual quality tends to be somewhere between 720p and 1080p -- you can make the screen big enough to resolve all 1080p detail, but it's kind of too large at that point. I think I mostly watch around an "850p" level of detail.
I also watch it with my AirPods Pro paired up, and the app lets me manually adjust the audio sync by 100 ms to compensate for the Bluetooth delay.
Watching TV through various specific apps can be more hit or miss, as they won't allow you to adjust the angle of the screen for example, so you can watch comfortably while reclining, or the Bluetooth audio delay. I assume they'll all figure this stuff out eventually.
So the tech is absolutely all there, but the UX can be very app-dependent.
Anecdotally, it's great in VR. It's actually become a regular habit for me; there's nothing quite as cool as watching a 3D movie with a friend who's a country away on a giant screen. This wasn't the case when FOVs were worse, though.
I've done it. It's a gimmick, like many things in VR. It feels neat once or twice to sit in a virtual movie theater, and then you realize that's stupid. If you are spending $1000 on a screen to watch movies, you are much better off with a big, high quality TV.
Well, it's definitely not a gimmick for me -- it's the main way I watch TV now, IF I'm watching it by myself.
It cost $300 not $1000 (at least when I bought it), and there's no big-screen TV that comes even close to the size of the screen in my headset. And there's certainly no room in my bedroom to put a big-screen TV anyways, which is where I'm watching something if somebody's watching something else in the living room.
I prefer my 50” 300$ 4k TV over the Quest for watching things. This is very much a too each his own thing, but I hated watching things in VR as I found it incredibly inconvenient, awkward, and it frankly didn’t look as good to me.
Anecdotal but I was on a flight recently and the fellow seated behind me brought his Quest2 for the flight. He said it was much better for watching movies than the poor quality of the in-flight screens. Makes sense since you can also download movies via Netflix or Amazon Prime
- $999
- Molded to your face
- 2560 × 2560 per eye (higher than the HP Reverb and nearly every other headset, lower than PIMAX 8K)
- 90° × 93° FOV (lower than most other headsets)
- 127g (excluding strap/cord, MUCH lighter than any existing headset)
- Does not come with controllers or trackers (compatible with existing lighthouses, bring your own)