It'll be nice to have more high end non-Meta options. Meta's headsets are a pain to use for PCVR. Third party software like Virtual Desktop is basically mandatory for Meta and PCVR.
(For the curious, this website I maintain about setting up a particular flight sim with VR documents all the meta-specific tweaks and caveats I've found: https://www.8492sqdn.net/guides/dcs/performance/)
I'll admit that I'm not up-to-date with all the updates and developments, nor do I play DCS, but I've never felt like Virtual Desktop was required. I just hook it up with a cable, open the Oculus app and then I can use whatever runtime or software I want. That's the way it always worked for me.
I’ve not been using Virtual Desktop but regardless, yes, PCVR on Meta headsets is more of a pain than it needs to be. At best it’s a second class citizen to the onboard experience, which as a PCVR user I have zero interest in (there’s no good reason to invest in a library that’s locked to Facebook, and onboard capabilities are uninspiring compared to those of a PC). It seems like they break Link functionality every other software update, too.
BSB2 is definitely on my radar as a replacement for a Quest 2. No inside-out tracking is a bit of a letdown (I don’t relish the thought of setting up lighthouses) but a dedicated no-nonsense PCVR experience combined with the weight and bulk savings would be worth it.
1. Meta's Link software uses highly suboptimal video streaming settings. Makes a big difference in flight sims where you need to see fine detail on instruments and distant aircraft.
2. With Virtual Desktop, I can remove my headset during a long flight to grab a snack or use the restroom, then put the headset back on and resume. With Meta's software, taking the headset off requires fully restarting both the sim and headset.
I love that eye tracking is built in this bodes well for my VR hypothesis:
The killer app for the VR platform is eye contact.
In my opinion Zoom should be investing heavily in this, and Zoom’s market is the one newcomers stand to gain.
The giant feature that Real Life™ has and teleconferencing lacks is the subtle baton passing, engagement reading, and tone modulation that is enabled by eye contact. A square of video just isn’t the same.
My corollary hypothesis for why this hasn’t been done yet is that the Mark Zuckerbergs and John Carmacks of the world are on the autism spectrum, they get by without this information, and therefore don’t realize how much the rest of us rely on it.
I'm a UX Engineer. My phone was ringing off the hook to build VR meeting software in the early 2010s, and I couldn't understand the appeal of either seeing people wearing computers on their faces, or in having conferences with cartoon avatars.
I do. During the pandemic I experimented with some colleagues with VR meeting software like Spatial and Arthur. I thought they were great. These days there's also Viverse which is also impressive. And then there's Microsoft Mesh which we get for free but which is ridiculously behind all the others. It's cool but there's nothing you can actually do in it. You can't pull in a presentation, movie clip, 3D object, collaborate on a whiteboard etc. You can just watch a teams meeting and play some games and roast marshmallows.
For a regular "death by powerpoint" meeting where 95% of participants are just being bored by a single presenter, no, not for those. But for brainstorming workshops, yes definitely.
The avatars are cartoony but for me that doesn't matter. They represent the person for me after a small adjustment period.
It gave me a much stronger feeling of being together. And it's much easier to break out into little groups, much much easier than those 'breakout rooms' in teams which are pretty inflexible. Here you can just walk over to another group just in real life. It really felt like being there with them and after taking the headset off I had this feeling of suprise of being at home.
It was also great to be able to import 3D models of our products and discuss them.
> In my opinion Zoom should be investing heavily in this, and Zoom’s market is the one newcomers stand to gain.
I'm genuinely unsure if you're saying all this with a wink: we're into year 10 of VR Neue, it's been a tarpit for all who got in, and it sounds like an absolutely horrible idea for the video call company to dump money into VR for...eye contact?
Note the headset that supports this is $1200. And that's par for the course for eye tracking AFAIK.
I love VR and against my rational side, still invest in a premium headset every year two.
Price, historical market, corporate finances, and responsible stewardship aside, I absolutely cannot wrap my head around the idea that VR eye contact with an uncanny valley head replica and/or cartoon improves eye contact over...just seeing your eyes...so much that it's a killer app.
(my poor unfortunate Vision Pro and it's rapid dropoff in sales seem to indicate this very strongly as well)
Many people don't want to strap a device to their face for work meetings, the fidelity loss is acceptable to them.
I think the killer app is smart glasses for AR (non passthrough), and maybe virtual monitors with Immersed + Visor (when that ships), low likelihood imo still
Devices will not be mainstream until they reach a sufficiently small form factor
That's basically what the Apple Vision Pro is designed to be, in terms of UX and software. It just turns out we're still a long way away from the hardware being small and light enough to make that work.
Do the adjustable lenses work if you have an astigmatism?
This biggest concern I have about VR, especially for work, is that it forces you to spend too much time looking a screen that is very close to your eyes. This is known to cause myopia and digital eyestrain.
Do any VR headsets attempt to address this problem? Can a headset force your eyes to change focal distance either using the display, or more likely, a physical lens? Ideally the headset would slowly, but consistently, force you to change your eyes focal distance. Is that something that Eye Tracking would enable?
Also, does eye tracking work properly if your eyes are slightly misaligned?
As far as your eyes are concerned the screen isn't actually that close, the optics in VR headsets are arranged such that the perceived focal distance is always about 2 meters away. That can have the odd effect of "fixing" nearsightedness in VR because no matter how far away something is in virtual space, your eyes only have to focus at ~2m.
VR headsets use lenses which focus the image at a long distance. It is like standing outside and looking at a distant hill, not at all like holding a phone up to your eyes.
It's a fantastic looking piece of hardware, but that price is hard to swallow given that PC VR has been on life support for years and there isn't really any signs of it making a comeback. The content still being made for VR almost exclusively targets Quest standalone as the lead (or only) platform since that's where >90% of the money is. Nobody aside from Valve can afford to make a "too big for Quest" title like HL:Alyx.
I think it's really worth keeping in mind that this is an ultra-enthusiast product: they're specifically targeting the niche of people who spend a huge amount of time in VR and probably in only a handful of the same apps every time (piloting/racing sims, VRChat, etc). The value prop here is effectively "this is a quality- and comfort-increasing upgrade to the thing you already spend all your free time doing".
Yeah, there's a market of people who are willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for marginal improvements to VR. There are communities who spend about as much time in VRChat as they do in meatspace. And plenty of older folks who are into motorsport and aviation where the cost of a headset is trivial compared to running costs of a sports car or airplane.
Beat Saber is another big title for VR enthusiasts. For the past couple of years I’ve been using BS custom maps to add some consistently fun cardio to my days and have logged almost as many hours as I spent on WoW back in my high school and uni days.
Bigscreen as a company isn't really looking to expand the VR market, it's just making an enthusiast-grade product aimed at people who know exactly what they want. Quest focuses on being a smartphone-like device with an integrated ecosystem, while Beyond is more of a PC peripheral for using Bigscreen the app, video content, social VR and some simulators. The audience for these things is small, but pretty dedicated, so it makes sense to offer a high-end solution targeting just them.
The VRChat userbase and the Flight/Racing Sim userbases are both thriving and very, very, *very* interested in continuing to have very good VR options; and both of those userbases have the money to keep companies like BSB and Vive alive.
I feel like some parts of the HN crowd are oblivious to the advancements and continued, impressive work that happens in the VR Space, just because a VR game isn't (for the time being) going to sell a million copies, but it will very comfortably sell to a 100k userbase that want to spend that money.
Valve had an early lead with the Index and has plenty of titles in its store that were designed for the Index. Then Oculus came along with the Quest and many of the titles were ported over there.
People who prefer Valve to Facebook, or who want a device-agnostic software library, might prefer buying from Steam. However, many of these games have been basically abandoned on Steam. Even though Quest ports exist, the versions on Steam may have controls that don't work with Quest controllers over Steam Link.
Bigscreen made their name as VR video viewing solution before pivoting to PCVR hardware. I’m surprised they haven’t shown off any simple video solution with Beyond 2 especially considering that’s the main use case for the Apple Vision Pro.
That said, eye tracking and IPD adjustment is a huge upgrade to Beyond 2 for their niche
>If Valve doesn't announce a new hmd by the summer, i might get this. the index is getting a bit too blurry and heavy for long sessions.
Not gonna happen. VR is a pure software play for them at this point, with what remains of the hardware having standardized on SteamVR. Index was nothing more than an experiment to help with SDK adoption.
Same. The Index is way too heavy for long sessions and the screen door effect is quite noticeable. I bought it in 2020 and haven't really touched it after playing some Half Life Alyx and Beat Saber. A headset that's only 107 g would be really amazing.
Super interested in this when the eye tracking is available but need some reviews for that first. For sit-down VR the price isn't really an issue for this, given how the GPU market is now anyway. It is a niche product for sure.
Foveated rendering with decent eye tracking could help us get out of the combo of high resolution / low framerates for clarity vs low resolution / high framerates for comfort.
Also, Valve seem to be ready to say something but it feels like it'll probably be (sensibly) a Steam Deck strapped to your head for stand-alone solution, and that's not the same market as this PC VR set-up is aimed at. Maybe if Valve take the 'store subsidy' hit and price it well and you can run a cable to it anyway..
The bit that's not obvious is how the low weight and short leverage of the headset affects lag.
When you are wearing a heavy headset that extends far from your face, it's not just the rendering latency and screen latency that affects the disconnect between your head movements and what you see. The headset physically lags behind your head motion because it has inertia. The total lag is the sum of the digital and physical lag. So, improving the frame rate can only get closer to the physical lag.
And, that's on top of the practically-instant pixel response of OLED vs LCD.
All that is to say that there are physical explanations for why 90 and even 75 Hz is better in practice than people would reasonably expect on the BSB. I can confirm first-hand. And, so have many reviewers.
Readit News
(For the curious, this website I maintain about setting up a particular flight sim with VR documents all the meta-specific tweaks and caveats I've found: https://www.8492sqdn.net/guides/dcs/performance/)
There's also quite a lot of drama right now between Meta, Khronos and OpenXR: https://mbucchia.github.io/OpenXR-Toolkit/
BSB2 is definitely on my radar as a replacement for a Quest 2. No inside-out tracking is a bit of a letdown (I don’t relish the thought of setting up lighthouses) but a dedicated no-nonsense PCVR experience combined with the weight and bulk savings would be worth it.
2. With Virtual Desktop, I can remove my headset during a long flight to grab a snack or use the restroom, then put the headset back on and resume. With Meta's software, taking the headset off requires fully restarting both the sim and headset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbFU6KoEASU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpzZWTz1h0w
The killer app for the VR platform is eye contact.
In my opinion Zoom should be investing heavily in this, and Zoom’s market is the one newcomers stand to gain.
The giant feature that Real Life™ has and teleconferencing lacks is the subtle baton passing, engagement reading, and tone modulation that is enabled by eye contact. A square of video just isn’t the same.
My corollary hypothesis for why this hasn’t been done yet is that the Mark Zuckerbergs and John Carmacks of the world are on the autism spectrum, they get by without this information, and therefore don’t realize how much the rest of us rely on it.
For a regular "death by powerpoint" meeting where 95% of participants are just being bored by a single presenter, no, not for those. But for brainstorming workshops, yes definitely.
The avatars are cartoony but for me that doesn't matter. They represent the person for me after a small adjustment period.
It gave me a much stronger feeling of being together. And it's much easier to break out into little groups, much much easier than those 'breakout rooms' in teams which are pretty inflexible. Here you can just walk over to another group just in real life. It really felt like being there with them and after taking the headset off I had this feeling of suprise of being at home.
It was also great to be able to import 3D models of our products and discuss them.
I'm genuinely unsure if you're saying all this with a wink: we're into year 10 of VR Neue, it's been a tarpit for all who got in, and it sounds like an absolutely horrible idea for the video call company to dump money into VR for...eye contact?
Note the headset that supports this is $1200. And that's par for the course for eye tracking AFAIK.
I love VR and against my rational side, still invest in a premium headset every year two.
Price, historical market, corporate finances, and responsible stewardship aside, I absolutely cannot wrap my head around the idea that VR eye contact with an uncanny valley head replica and/or cartoon improves eye contact over...just seeing your eyes...so much that it's a killer app.
(my poor unfortunate Vision Pro and it's rapid dropoff in sales seem to indicate this very strongly as well)
https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
I think the killer app is smart glasses for AR (non passthrough), and maybe virtual monitors with Immersed + Visor (when that ships), low likelihood imo still
Devices will not be mainstream until they reach a sufficiently small form factor
That's basically what the Apple Vision Pro is designed to be, in terms of UX and software. It just turns out we're still a long way away from the hardware being small and light enough to make that work.
This biggest concern I have about VR, especially for work, is that it forces you to spend too much time looking a screen that is very close to your eyes. This is known to cause myopia and digital eyestrain.
Do any VR headsets attempt to address this problem? Can a headset force your eyes to change focal distance either using the display, or more likely, a physical lens? Ideally the headset would slowly, but consistently, force you to change your eyes focal distance. Is that something that Eye Tracking would enable?
Also, does eye tracking work properly if your eyes are slightly misaligned?
All available VR headsets have a fixed focal distance, usually 2 meters, regardless of how close or far the virtual content is from your head.
Eye tracking is done independently per eye.
I feel like some parts of the HN crowd are oblivious to the advancements and continued, impressive work that happens in the VR Space, just because a VR game isn't (for the time being) going to sell a million copies, but it will very comfortably sell to a 100k userbase that want to spend that money.
People who prefer Valve to Facebook, or who want a device-agnostic software library, might prefer buying from Steam. However, many of these games have been basically abandoned on Steam. Even though Quest ports exist, the versions on Steam may have controls that don't work with Quest controllers over Steam Link.
That said, eye tracking and IPD adjustment is a huge upgrade to Beyond 2 for their niche
Not gonna happen. VR is a pure software play for them at this point, with what remains of the hardware having standardized on SteamVR. Index was nothing more than an experiment to help with SDK adoption.
Foveated rendering with decent eye tracking could help us get out of the combo of high resolution / low framerates for clarity vs low resolution / high framerates for comfort.
Also, Valve seem to be ready to say something but it feels like it'll probably be (sensibly) a Steam Deck strapped to your head for stand-alone solution, and that's not the same market as this PC VR set-up is aimed at. Maybe if Valve take the 'store subsidy' hit and price it well and you can run a cable to it anyway..
On my Quest 3, I find 120Hz to be night and day compared to 90.
EDIT: their promo page says that 90Hz OLED feels like 120Hz LCD for VR.
When you are wearing a heavy headset that extends far from your face, it's not just the rendering latency and screen latency that affects the disconnect between your head movements and what you see. The headset physically lags behind your head motion because it has inertia. The total lag is the sum of the digital and physical lag. So, improving the frame rate can only get closer to the physical lag.
And, that's on top of the practically-instant pixel response of OLED vs LCD.
All that is to say that there are physical explanations for why 90 and even 75 Hz is better in practice than people would reasonably expect on the BSB. I can confirm first-hand. And, so have many reviewers.
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[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbFU6KoEASU