Big screen beyond 2

[actually_fred]

SteamVR supports OpenXR, and is one of the best OpenXR runtimes - but only when used for SteamVR-native headsets, like the BigScreen Beyond and the Valve Index. It tends to have issues/overhead when the headset is *not* SteamVR-native (e.g. when SteamVR is just wrapping other software from the manufacturer like Oculus Link or WMR).

Most hardware manufacturers with their own runtime have done a substantially worse job than Valve have with SteamVR - especially the smaller manufacturers - and it takes engineering time from other things that are more useful.

By asking BigScreen to create/support an alternative OpenXR runtime, you're asking BigScreen to spend significantly more time on software development for no concrete benefits, and a likely worse overall result. I understand some of you may dislike SteamVR, but that doesn't mean that SteamVR is technically bad or the wrong choice for all headsets.

Edited March 25 by actually_fred

[7Coolhand]

I pulled the trigger and ordered a B2Be. I really like what this company is trying to do. I cross my fingers and hope they will support DFR. 

[skywalker22]

53 minutes ago, 7Coolhand said:

I pulled the trigger and ordered a B2Be. I really like what this company is trying to do. I cross my fingers and hope they will support DFR. 

Somebody has to be 1st to try it out. Very brave move, well done. But they are only coming in May, right? Will be soon.

[7Coolhand]

Either way, I think it will be an upgrade to a Quest Pro. DP connected, higher resolution, OLED and really lightweight.

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

The requirement, price aside, of external station puts me off.

OpenXR running on SteamVR is not that bad these days, I run a racing sim on this platform and it works fine so far.

[Aapje]

4 hours ago, actually_fred said:

By asking BigScreen to create/support an alternative OpenXR runtime, you're asking BigScreen to spend significantly more time on software development for no concrete benefits, and a likely worse overall result. I understand some of you may dislike SteamVR, but that doesn't mean that SteamVR is technically bad or the wrong choice for all headsets.

The benefit is that you are not at the mercy of support by an individual vendor. Look at what happened to the WMR headsets, once MS lost interest. Bye bye WMR. Who knows if Valve is going to stay interested? Perhaps the Valve Deckard will be a flop and they'll just give up on VR or do the very minimum to keep existing things going, but not improving things. That is the risk that you are taking by getting a headset that is linked to a company.

It's pretty clear that the market is moving to the sensible choice: OpenXR. That way, the software and hardware is not dependent on a single company that may lose interest, or may want to abuse their power, but they base their API on the work of a neutral consortium that is not dependent on a single company. In the chain of OpenXR Headset - OpenXR Runtime - OpenXR Game Engine VR driver, you can swap out any of these elements without impacting the other ones. And this in turn keeps the companies honest, since they can't just get away with crappy quality because people are bound to their software.

You say that you are happy with the performance of SteamVR today, but that wasn't the case in the past. What if it becomes bad again? What if SteamVR is slow to implement a feature that is present in another runtime? What if Valve gets into a conflict with Bigscreen and 'accidentally' breaks the integration with the Beyond? What if Valve decides that they want to be a console company, and restricts the API to their own hardware?

In any case, it seems pretty clear to me that Valve lost a lot of money on VR and the only reason why they stick with it is because Gabe believes in it. But he's 62. That's an age where a lot of risks start to increase. The risk of him retiring. Health issues. Age related mental decline. Etc. Gabe is obviously a very good person, and someone who (currently) believes in VR, but what happens when someone else becomes in charge of Valve? Even a very decent successor who merely decides to cut the unprofitable parts of Valve may be the end of SteamVR.

[kablamoman]

@Aapje

The user above did a pretty good job of explaining to you that Steam VR headsets like Index and Bigscreen’s offerings already run OpenXR natively.

It’s not like using it with a Reverb G2 or an Oculus headset. If that is your experience and the reason for your comments, it may be understandable if you think SteamVR automatically means some kind of performance hit or less than ideal experience.

Despite your misgivings Valve has proven to be a pretty good steward, and the very OpenXR support you’re calling for is already there and a direct result of their dedication and continued attention to PC VR. The experience with Steam VR and the Beyond is honestly pretty hassle-free and straight forward.

[Aapje]

2 hours ago, kablamoman said:

 

The user above did a pretty good job of explaining to you that Steam VR headsets like Index and Bigscreen’s offerings already run OpenXR natively.

That's not what the other person said, nor is it true. I think that you are confused. The Bigscreen Beyond is currently a SteamVR headset, and does not natively support OpenXR. However, SteamVR is an OpenXR runtime, so the games can talk to SteamVR with OpenXR, but then SteamVR talks to the Beyond with their own protocol, not with OpenXR.

You can compare it to buying something in China, where you (= the game in this analogy) speak only English and the vendor (= the headset) only speaks Chinese. Then you need an English - Chinese translator to be able to communicate. If you bring a translator, you can talk to the vendor, but that doesn't mean that the vendor speaks English natively. And similarly, you can't claim that the Beyond natively supports OpenXR, when SteamVR is translating the OpenXR API that the game is using, to the SteamVR API when communicating with the headset.

I just saw that Bigscreen is claiming to develop an OpenXR integration, so they seem to be doing exactly what I am saying they should do:

"Planned development

Foveated rendering for improved VR performance and integrations with SteamVR and OpenXR are under development in 2025."

This text comes from the homepage of the Bigscreen website. So clearly their engineers agree with me

2 hours ago, kablamoman said:

Despite your misgivings Valve has proven to be a pretty good steward

That's just your opinion. It took them quite a while to optimize SteamVR and for a long time people were extremely happy that they could use mbucchia's OpenVR to OpenXR translation software to greatly improve their performance, by getting rid of SteamVR. Even today you still gain some FPS if you don't use SteamVR. If those games were built for the OpenXR-standard in the first place, instead of the SteamVR-specific API, it would be far easier to switch runtime, less buggy due to not requiring a translation layer, and wouldn't be dependent on the very hard and unpaid work by mbucchia.

But with the Bigscreen Beyond you are locked into SteamVR right now, so you simply don't have any other option. You are completely ignoring one of the main points I made, which is that a dependency on SteamVR means that you are at the mercy of whatever Valve does in the future. Even if you are happy with what Valve did in the past, that provides absolutely no guarantee for the future.

Reverb G2 buyers also didn't imagine that the WMR-runtime would be removed with no alternative, yet it happened.

[actually_fred]

SteamVR supports OpenXR natively.

Other runtimes from hardware manufacturers are generally substantially worse than steamvr, and I’m talking about correctness, not just performance. Valve did recently introduce some openxr correctness bugs, and when I reported them, they fixed them within two days - Meta is the only other hardware vendor to actually fix openxr correctness issues when I’ve reported them (but sadly seem to pretty much never fix issues reported in PTC before rolling out to stable), even when I point at failing tests in the openxr conformance test suite.

Openxr isn’t a magic wand for lockin - using your own example, WMR had its own OpenXR runtime, and Microsoft abandoned it. The crystal is similarly tied to Pimax’s software, quests are tied to Metas (or when using the alternative to Link, still Metas firmware), etc.

That said, I’m 100% with you on *game* adoption of openxr being a good thing. On a minor note, OpenComposite (the openvr to Openxr translation layer) is not one of mbuchhia’s projects, and for most of his VR projects, he explicitly did not support them when used with opencomposite.

Edit: 

4 hours ago, Aapje said:

Foveated rendering for improved VR performance and integrations with SteamVR and OpenXR are under development in 2025."

This text comes from the homepage of the Bigscreen website. So clearly their engineers agree with me

While it is possible, this doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means; several other vendors ship additional OpenXR integrations as API layers which require SteamVR - for example, HTC have done this for several of their headsets, adding face and hand tracking via OpenXR on top of SteamVR.

Edited March 26 by actually_fred

[AlessandroFuBu]

17 ore fa, skywalker22 ha scritto:

Somebody has to be 1st to try it out. Very brave move, well done. But they are only coming in May, right? Will be soon.

 

I think that in this video, Mark Kovalcson, answered to your comment

"The Beyond and Beyond 2 absolutely work well with OpenXR. I use OpenXR for Beat Saber and DCS and MSFS. OpenXR sits on top of SteamVR and works seamlessly."

[ackattacker]

46 minutes ago, AlessandroFuBu said:

 

"The Beyond and Beyond 2 absolutely work well with OpenXR. I use OpenXR for Beat Saber and DCS and MSFS. OpenXR sits on top of SteamVR and works seamlessly."

I think we are starting to talk in circles. OpenXR is an open source software platform which is what game developers use to interface with headset software. So in this case, BSB talks natively SteamVR basically emulating a Valve Index and SteamVR is therefore the headset application and "runs" the headset. OpenXR applications talk to SteamVR via OpenXR protocol and in this way they pass the data back and forth. Another way to do it is for headset manufacturers to use their own headset software which can talk OpenXR, bypassing the SteamVR application. That's how Pimax does it currently. This requires them to develop their own software to run the headset but gives more control over things like passing eye tracking data or doing their own implementation of motion reprojection. If you run a Meta headset you can also use OpenXR but once again Meta software is communicating with the headset. Basically almost all the headset manufacturers now work with OpenXR and almost all the VR applications now talk OpenXR.  But OpenXR always requires to interface with the headset through another software layer, be it SteamVR, Pimax Play, Varjo Base, Meta Quest Link etc. etc. etc. There is no such thing as OpenXR application that directly communicates to the headset AFAIK. Personally I think it makes sense for small boutique headset manufacturers to just use SteamVR because it's a polished product that works fine. It may have limitations though when you try to do things SteamVR wasn't designed to do like quad views foveated rendering.

Edited March 26 by ackattacker

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

22 minutes ago, ackattacker said:

just use SteamVR because it's a polished product that works fine

Well, from the little I read here, this is exactly the bone of contention. I used to hate SteamVR a lot and I find it better now, but not tried it with DCS World, and other flight sim to be clear.

[actually_fred]

5 hours ago, Aapje said:

The Bigscreen Beyond is currently a SteamVR headset, and does not natively support OpenXR. However, SteamVR is an OpenXR runtime, so the games can talk to SteamVR with OpenXR, but then SteamVR talks to the Beyond with their own protocol, not with OpenXR.

This is true - it uses the OpenVR *driver* API, which is separate to the OpenVR game API. However, every other OpenXR runtime except for the simulators (e.g Meta's XR simulator, or the simulator built into varjo base to allow testing their runtime without a headset) also talks to the headset with their own internal driver/API (or in some cases, Windows.Devices.Display.Core - this is documented as a UWP API, but is not limtied to UWP), not with OpenXR. While early OpenXR presentations mentioned an OpenXR device interface (a.k.a. driver), this was never actually specified or implemented.

As a developer working with and on OpenXR, I would like to see more (good) runtimes. As a consumer interested in niche headsets from small manufacturers, I'd much rather have one with a mandatory complex piece of software developed by Valve rather than the small manufacturer. I have more trust in Valve to keep delivering a reliable runtime for my expected lifetime for a headset.

My definition of a 'good' runtime is:

- publicly released versions pass a recent version of the freely-available OpenXR test suite
- performant

Sadly the majority of runtimes fail the first point - i.e. they do not work correctly. Most vendors seem to test with common games, and maybe run the test suite every year or two, but mostly leave it to users to discover issues that the manufacturer already has access to nice, isolated, reproducible examples with clear pass/fail definitions. 

I personally consider it misleading to call something an 'OpenXR runtime' if it does not pass a recent version of the OpenXR test suite. Khronos have their own definition which overlaps, but is in some ways weaker (e.g. Meta's PC software is considered conformant, but the tested version is from 2020 on a rift S, and Valve's is from 2021), and some ways stronger (formal process and review, membership, and IP framework rather than just 'tests pass')

Edited March 26 by actually_fred

[kablamoman]

@Aapje

As mentioned by @actually_fred, every headset uses its own software to interface with the PC at the device driver level. Bigscreen, as it’s already using lighthouse hardware for tracking, has chosen to use Steam VR because a lot of the software-hardware interface work has already been done — and to a very high level of quality! OpenXR support is something that, in turn, interfaces with that software. Steam VR features native OpenXR support in the same way it has/had native OpenVR support. Headsets native to SteamVR have the benefit of a well maintained software suite on all fronts, especially compared to some of the smaller vendors, as was mentioned. You seem to be conflating the SteamVR interface with its older legacy OpenVR API and runtime, which, for non-steam VR/OpenVR headsets like the G2 or oculus headsets, presented the problem of basic compatibility and also performance because those headsets themselves had poor implementations of their OpenVR support. Open Composite was a wrapper that translated API calls to their native runtimes — but did not offer any kind of performance benefit for headsets that were already SteamVR native like the Index or old Vive headsets. The same holds true for the Beyond headsets, which use the Steam VR driver/interface, and which can use its native OpenXR support without the need for any kind of software wrapper, and so there is no negative performance impact.

Once again, Fred has also demonstrated with an example of his personal experience as a dev and working through support channels, that Valve is one of the most responsive and engaged supporters of the OpenXR standard.

If your reticence to the idea of “Steam VR” is borne out of your experience with a G2 or Oculus headset, I would appreciate you being up front about that, being open to learning a bit about why the same problems don’t hold true for native Steam VR HMDs, and to stop spreading misinformation. 

 

 

Edited March 26 by kablamoman

[Willie Nelson]

Can someone clarify for me which lenses will be on the Crystal Super, MeganeX and BSB2? I’m confused. 

[oz555]

I have waited a long time for an upgrade to my G2. The specs on this one finally ticked all the boxes. What really sealed the deal for me from watching interviews and viewing Reddit posts,  was the honest and transparent approach of the company and their practical vision for PC VR. The market has been full of snake oil claims and unsubstantiated promises in recent years. It's great to see some integrity on show.   

[Habu_69]

As a BsB V1 owner I can say the their customer service is excellent.

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

So, how does the Steam Station work then? I am wary about that, too spoiled by headsets with built-in tracking may be.

[ackattacker]

11 hours ago, Willie Nelson said:

Can someone clarify for me which lenses will be on the Crystal Super, MeganeX and BSB2? I’m confused. 

Crystal Super (QLED version) uses a single large asphyrical glass lens and large panels.

MeganeX uses a pancake optics stack with medium size panels.

BSB (both 1 and 2) use a pancake optics stack with very small panels.

Each design has pros and cons. People are excited about the BSB v2 mostly because their new pancake optics stack greatly improves upon most of the "cons" that have plagued pancake optics in the past, namely excessive glare, poor edge clarity, poor brightness, and poor FOV. It likely still trails behind asphyric lenses in most of those categories, but it has advantages of much smaller and lighter, oled contrast and black levels, and good sweet spot and low distortion. It seems that with the improvements it *may* be the era of pancake optics coming to the forefront of VR tech.

[kablamoman]

2 hours ago, VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants said:

So, how does the Steam Station work then? I am wary about that, too spoiled by headsets with built-in tracking may be

Each lighthouse is a self-contained little box you mount on a wall, ceiling, or even just put somewhere in the room. It requires only a power cable to an electrical outlet, and no data connection to your computer.

It basically floods the room in IR light (works in the dark), that the headset uses to tell where it is in 3D space (it’s still inside-out tracking). Tracking with just one lighthouse is good, but you can add additional units seamlessly and it’ll allow for even more accurate positional calculations, and also make it less prone to occlusion. For the Beyond, as its surface area does not protrude beyond the sides of your face, like say, the Index, it is a good idea to have at least two lighthouses with at least one positioned some where behind, as you will be checking six and your head itself may block line of sight to the base stations. I personally noticed this being an issue with the BSB (when it wasn’t previously with my Index), but a reposition of the lighthouses resolved it.

I moved on to a Q3 after problems with the first BSB’s optical stack turned out to be DCS deal breakers for me, and one of the things I really miss is the light house tracking (which really can’t be beat), in addition to the dedicated DP connection.

Looking forward to giving the BSB 2 a go, as a lot of the reviews are saying the edge-to-edge clarity rivals that of the Q3! If so, I foresee my Q3 collecting a lot of dust.

Edited March 28 by kablamoman

[7Coolhand]

3 hours ago, kablamoman said:

Each lighthouse is a self-contained little box you mount on a wall, ceiling, or even just put somewhere in the room. It requires only a power cable to an electrical outlet, and no data connection to your computer.

It basically floods the room in IR light (works in the dark), that the headset uses to tell where it is in 3D space (it’s still inside-out tracking). Tracking with just one lighthouse is good, but you can add additional units seamlessly and it’ll allow for even more accurate positional calculations, and also make it less prone to occlusion. For the Beyond, as its surface area does not protrude beyond the sides of your face, like say, the Index, it is a good idea to have at least two lighthouses with at least one positioned some where behind, as you will be checking six and your head itself may block line of sight to the base stations. I personally noticed this being an issue with the BSB (when it wasn’t previously with my Index), but a reposition of the lighthouses resolved it.

I moved on to a Q3 after problems with the first BSB’s optical stack turned out to be DCS deal breakers for me, and one of the things I really miss is the light house tracking (which really can’t be beat), in addition to the dedicated DP connection.

Looking forward to giving the BSB 2 a go, as a lot of the reviews are saying the edge-to-edge clarity rivals that of the Q3! If so, I foresee my Q3 collecting a lot of dust.

Found a used HTC vive with 2 base stations and controls for 70€ in town.

Are the base stations and controls compatible with BSB?

[kablamoman]

8 hours ago, 7Coolhand said:

Are the base stations and controls compatible with BSB?

I believe so, but depending on the version of Vive they could be the older 1.0 base stations, which would limit you to a maximum of two in your room set up.

[Willie Nelson]

On 3/29/2025 at 12:30 AM, ackattacker said:

Crystal Super (QLED version) uses a single large asphyrical glass lens and large panels.

MeganeX uses a pancake optics stack with medium size panels.

BSB (both 1 and 2) use a pancake optics stack with very small panels.

Each design has pros and cons. People are excited about the BSB v2 mostly because their new pancake optics stack greatly improves upon most of the "cons" that have plagued pancake optics in the past, namely excessive glare, poor edge clarity, poor brightness, and poor FOV. It likely still trails behind asphyric lenses in most of those categories, but it has advantages of much smaller and lighter, oled contrast and black levels, and good sweet spot and low distortion. It seems that with the improvements it *may* be the era of pancake optics coming to the forefront of VR tech.

Thanks for that. That was what I was thinking. I could appreciate the benefit of slim line and accept that pancake lenses may have improves but if they compromise the optics such that barrel distortion correction is more that that required for aspheric lenses then I’m still not interested. Needing a high barrel distortion correction is the same as needing a next generation of GPU. That is why I was sufficiently impressed with the Aero and Crystal OG when they came out over the G2. BSB 2.0 sounds like an improvement over previous iterations especially if their eye tracking implementation proves effective with DCS but it’s not for me for now. 

[kerlcat]

MRTV ‘s 1st impression on production version of Pimax Super is just released. Will keep my preorder till full reviews by multiple independent YouTubers in a week or two. MeganeX seems great as well especially outstanding contract and tiny form, but much smaller FOV, lack of eye tracking and inside-out… Looking forward to see some side by side comparison by sim reviewers then.