mhe

Yeah, the sale was pretty insane, everybody got stuck during checkout because the payment servers couldn't handle the onslaught, I got my order through 5 minutes after the orders opened for Austria, friend of mine 10 minutes after opening and the whole thing was over in 15. And now the earliest you can get is September... There is rare footage of normal vs double element lenses side by side, if that is any indicator for that wo expect from the Index, then I'm thrilled!!!

You, good Sir, just made my day! I hate halo-headstrap designs with a passion and I am thrilled that I can replace that with something else! Would you mind linking me to some of those videos where they take it off?

I have both coming. I'll happily provide comparisons once all the stuff has arrived.

Do we know that it is removable? I'd be thrilled if that were the case!

I think for most stuff, you'll be fine with the 1080Ti. The benefit of the 2080Ti over the 1080Ti is nowhere near worth the price (SweViver did a comparison for that exact scenario and came out quite disappointed). The only nice stuff the new RTX GPUs can do is foveated rendering in hardware, which the most recent PiTool actually implements, albeit fixed to the center of the viewpoint since there is no eyetracking. I trust Wags so much that I blindly ordered a Rift S for my travel setup since he said he can read everything in the cockpit (which is my baseline for desirability of a HMD), since the self-contained design lends itself well to that. I just wish Oculus would have given the Quest an option for tethering instead of making it a walled garden with standalone only. I hope Quest 2 delivers on that someday. Also, I hope Oculus drops the whole Walled Garden mentality altogether.

I have ordered both an Index and a Rift S, so I'll be set in any case. I hope the Index will do half of the gloriousness that the XTAL does in terms of optics, albeit with a smaller FOV. The Rift S is just the easy thing for my travels and should be doing fine when hooked up to my laptop.

Also, I think going for higher and higher res is not the way forward. XTAL, albeit at a crazy price, demonstrates very well the levels of clarity you can get at mere Pimax 5K res even without supersampling, as long as your optics are on point. I think the res race is about as silly as the megapixel race that the digital cameras are subject to. In the end, visual clarity is what counts and the less resolution you achieve that with, the better. Because GPUs can only do so much. All this res race is basically trying to shift the burden of making up for imperfect optics by brute forcing it with raw GPU power. That can only go so far.

True, but unless the upcoming VR efficiency patch delivers big time, I guess we'll be hard pressed to run that kind of res with reasonable FPS inside our beloved sim.

I don't mind a lack of IPD adjustment for myself (having a bog standard 64mm), but knowing my social circles, a lot of people will want to try that thing out and not being able to adjust them to the user will cost VR some reputation. While I originally planned to get a Reverb, I am waiting for more info on Acer's ConceptD OJO which will have the same panels but physical IPD adjustment on top of that. Let's see if they have different lenses as well.

2 grand for an XTAL? Sign me up! However, the quoted 5 grand is not even including taxes, so for everyday folk who don't own companies, the actual price is 6000 Euros. One has to work a while to pile up that kind of funds. And it probably won't hold its value well, others will get their hands on what they did and reverse engineer the hell out of that thing, even if they patented their secret sauce. I am just happy that the VR arms race is picking up pace. Also, StarVR (at a mere 3200 USD excl taxes for the dev kit when they still had them) might see the light of day under Acer's wing eventually. They talked about it. No doubt, XTAL and StarVR are the best HMDs in existence, but I think in the "you are not filthy rich" class, Index will be hard to beat for the foreseeable future.

The front cameras will be open source'd soon. So it won't be long until somebody comes up with inside-out tracking for the HMD I guess. For DCS, we won't need the knuckles controllers. Maybe somebody might even bring a hardware solution for the front expansion port. However, I would have appreciated them cooperating with you, simulations are big for VR and I do love what you guys have done with DCS VR.

Even if you'd order it today, you'd be holding off - earliest shipment except for those lucky few who got a pre-order in yesterday (within less than half an hour of opening) will have to wait for the end of August anyway.

People assume that it is just a Vive Pro. They have no idea. Resolution is not everything, XTAL has a better image quality than anything and does it with 1440p per eye panels. If the optics on the Index are on point, it is well worth the asking price.

They said the release would be in April. That means it has to be by tuesday if they want to stay true to their word. The blackout is really awkward.

I think, just as with many many other things tech, demanding backwards compatibility should only go so far. Yes, you have to spend more, but such is the price of not being hamstrung by limitations of previous generation hardware. You introduce a standard, refine it until it reaches the limitations of what you can do within these constraints, and once that happens, you have to come up with a new standard. Backwards compatibility is always desired but in many cases it would stop progress, so it has to be omitted if progress is to be made.

StarVR seems to be equally impressive and the latest price was 3200, so not that far off from the half price of the XTAL. Still, a steep investment.

Well we know that Gabe is unlikely to be satisfied with something that is merely up to the standards of Rift S or the Vive. Valve has quite a few patents on some VR tech that we haven't seen in use yet, so there is still a chance that some unique innovation will be presented come May. Sure, there is always the potential for disappointment, but I consider it unlikely, there must be a reason why they did it all by themselves this time instead of going for HTC or any other partner again. In the mainstream segment, Oculus is definitely the market leader and to some degree they dictate the pace of development of mainstream VR for now, but in the enthusiast segment they are already years behind. I am one of the lucky ones who don't have to worry that much about price and I am willing to pay big bucks for superior tech. but that does not necessarily mean that it makes much sense to cater to people like me exclusively. It is great that there is a mainstream forming, as long as the enthusiast segment remains a thing, I have no problem with that. I am quite sure that Valve will have to target a rather big audience as well due to economic reasons, but they are in a position to create exclusive content that is far beyond what Oculus can deliver in their little walled garden. If Valve releases an Orange Box or something similar alongside the Index, they could sell the Index at no profit at all and still make all the money with software. Oculus could do that as well to a degree, but the Oculus marketplace is tiny compared to the Steam platform. Also, Valve can create a lot of revenue by platform sales alone, something that Oculus can't leverage to that degree. So even at the same price, Valve has some means available to them that would allow them to integrate superior tech into the Index when compared with the Rift S. I think that it will roughly deliver soon what Oculus would have reserved for their CV2 (except maybe the dynamic focus optics from Half Dome, we know that Index uses a patented double fresnel system).

StarVR is almost a finished product. See This thing seems way past an engineering proposal cycle, they did hands-on demos to press. We don't know the actual resolution, but we do know it uses RGB stripe AMOLED displays and the res is being stated as "16 million subpixels". Which would roughly be 2x 1800x1500 assuming 3 subpixels per pixel. Which also means they could just as well use a lot higher res displays and still not run out of bandwidth. The question currently is whether VR SLI is mandatory to run them, which would make them even more expensive than they already are. But stuff like eyetracking, auto-IPD, dynamic distortion compensation based on IPD and tracking data (funnily enough, Valve has a patent on that), an insane FOV of 210/130 makes this the state of the art in pretty much any respect.

Still, Oculus is not improving on tech and specs at the rate the competition is. If the Index is what I hope it will be, it may have surpassed Oculus' Half Dome prototype before it went into production. Also, nobody and nothing can currently hold a candle to StarVR. Except price-wise. As for Oculus, they will stay in the price/performance budget segment, but since VR is still a niche, the enthusiast segment is a lot bigger in this market than it is in others. I think Oculus is targeting an audience that doesn't really exist yet.

StarVR does come with 2x VirtualLink connectors, so they could easily make 2160p and above panels while still maintaining 90+ Hz refresh. Acer have tweeted about having picked up the project again and StarVR is alive and kicking. But more detailed info is as scarce as about the D OJO.

I am absolutely willing to pay for quality, but StarVR price used to be 3200 USD.

The real news seems to be that Acer looks to have bought out Starbreeze and their StarVR project. That thing is beyond insanely awesome. If Acer makes it possible to bring the price down by volume, they'd have the absolute killer HMD.

I think he referred to the original predictions by Michael Abrash.

I'd be surprised if Wags hasn't asked for one already :D

Be prepared to do that all over again once the VR performance improvement drops that Wags spoke about!