My First SteemIt Post - Pimax 8K Noob's Eye Review

This is my first contribution on SteemIt, a review of the Pimax 8K HMD. Proper noob level view :slight_smile:

Wow, I think this is my first thread here too!

I’ll create 2 or 3 videos next, and upload it to DTube (SteemIt’s version of YouTube).

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Looks like you had a mostly positive experience. That’s nice to hear.

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Nice review thanks! Never heard of SteemIt before.

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Yeah, once I got past the initial issue with PiTool 76 not seeing the 8K, All has been pretty good since. I blew quite a few hours trying to get it to work initially. Trying 76 and 84

SteamVR would not see the headset, when I had PiTool 84 installed. Installed from scratch - not upgraded.

In the end it was allowing it to upgrade from 76 to 84 that allowed for it to work properly :slight_smile:

All good now :slight_smile:

Yeah, I only came across it a month or 2 ago. Seems quite interesting.

My opinion of it is, as they say, “the jury is still out”

Gonna try it out for a while and see if I like it.

Great review,glad you’re enjoying it.

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Great review! Also happy you’re enjoying it.

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@Chucksta: nice write-up, thanks ! Great to see that you are enjoying your 8K, and I admire your courage to back it when you owned two Pimax 4K devices only to recognize that for some odd reason they just don’t work visually for you. I would have been afraid that Pimax does something different in its approach which would replciate such issues yet again - but your instincts were vindicated :sweat_smile:

Just allow me three remarks on points I noticed in your review:

“The elsewhere mentioned 200 degree FoV is horizontal” -> diagonal, not horizontal.

“Reading text with the Pimax 4K was a nightmare for me. I had visual issues that just would not be solved. The Vive on the other hand, was a visual joy for me in game. I could read and see everything perfectly.”
-> assuming you didn’t mix the two up, how can the og Vive (not Vive Pro, right ?) let you read the text “perfectly” in game (assuming you are still talking of Elite, which you cite in the paragraph before ? I mean that has been one of the major gripes of the Vive (and to almost the same degree with the Rift) - as you mention in the preceeding para, you have to lean in in order to really see the letters on some of the smaller text (e.g. above the Pips). This reads confusing here because one wonders why you consider the 8K better if the Vive was perfect already.

“The sweet spot is pretty big (bigger then the 4K and the Vive), but I would like it to be bigger. Of course, foveated rendering would be the ideal fix, where it tracks where the eye is and only the image in that area of the screen is in full focus.”
-> interesting, what I read from most other users and remember from the V2, the sweet spot is so much bigger when compared to e.g. the Vive that I would just be very happy with it - can you describe which kind of FoV you can view sharply, and when it becomes blurry ? Perhaps your IPD setting could be improved ?
By the way, foveated rendering will principally not help with the sweet spot at all because that is determined by the physics of the lens and currently all areas are rendered in full resolution, while with foveated rendering all areas outside of the center of your focus (fovea) will be rendered in lower resolution(s) so they would only decrease but not increase the quality (and should not have any further effect on the sweet spot). Only if the blurriness of the lens ouside of the sweetspot could be countered by some kind of neat distortion algorithm demanding higher GPU power could that come into play if foveated rendering would free up GPU capacity for it, but I am not sure that works at all because blurriness means you cannot see the pixels sharp any longer and I suppose it is difficult to counter that effectively with any distortion algorithm.

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“These games were amazing, especially Subnautica, in which I could not even see any SDE (Screen Door Effect), and the text was perfectly crisp. Subnautica must have some seriously good game developers.”

FINALLY someone talks about Subnautica on the Pimax… I’ve been asking and waiting for a long time now and I’m really happy you say it works well with the Pimax!!!

Great review… THANK YOU!!!

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Thanks, and wow, some excellent feedback :slight_smile:

FoV: Ah nuts, I meant to have written diagonal! I read through that article many, many times, and totally missed that error. Hopefully, I can correct it. Thanks for highlighting that for me :slight_smile:

The Vive I talk about throughout, is the og Vive. I have not tried the Pro as yet. My view of it, is in comparison to the Pimax 4K. My wording may be a bit OTT, but I was definitely able to see the world a lot easier with the Vive than the 4K. The 4K had far better resolution, but due to the visual issues I had, it felt like my eyes were straining all the time. With the Vive, my eyes always felt totally relaxed. If it wasn’t for the sickness, I would probably still have the og Vive now.

The Sweet Spot - All 3 FoVs are perfectly in focus in the sweet spot area, it’s just that I tend to look around by moving my eyes, rather than my head, therefore they tend to leave the sweet spot, and hit the out of focus part of the image. I am getting better at just moving my head, but I would rather be able to move my eyes, and always have an in focus image.

IPD - I don’t think that has any effect on me. I usually have it on 64.1, but the other day, I went through the settings, going from the smallest to the largest setting, and they were all the same to me. The sweet spot area is perfectly clear. The image is perfectly in focus.
I should say, that technically I am one eyed (as far as the police and armed services are concerned). My left eye is perfectly fine, with perfect vision, but my right eye is no good and not correctable. I can still see out of my right eye, but my brain does not focus on anything with it.

I’d love to know why the 4K had those those visual issues for me that I could not correct! I thought it was the IPD, but now not so, after using the 8K.

Thanks for all the awesome info, and the very constructive criticism. I’ll go and see if I can correct that article now.

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Thanks :smiley:

Yeah, Subnautica is mind blowingly awesome!

I need to get controllers, to make playing the game easier, but you can get by fairly well with the keyboard and mouse. It’s the access of the menus that are a pain without controllers.

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You know… Subnautica wasn’t even created as a VR game… it was converted into a VR game. I’ve played it through and there are some really annoying issues in VR. There is one short but important part of the game where it is IMPOSSIBLE to play in VR. To accomplish this one particular task in the story, you have to play it on a monitor. But overall, Subnautica in VR is AWESOME. I played it with the SteamController and the app VoiceAttack… VoiceAttack makes working with the menus and other things MUCH easier.

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Cool, I have been meaning to get the Steam controller, I will do that now! And I’ll get that VoiceAttack app too :slight_smile:

Then head into Subnautica and have some more fun!

Thanks, matey :smiley:

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Blurriness isn’t the only issue with having your IPD set improperly, it is just the most noticeable. It also isn’t directly caused by the IPD being set improperly. The main reason that IPD caused blurriness on the Vive/Rift is that the sweet spot was so tiny that adjusting your IPD settings could move the sweet spot away from your eyes. The 8K/5K+, on the other hand, have a sweet spot that is similar in size to the ENTIRE FOV of the Rift/Vive and no amount of IPD adjustment will move that away from your eye.

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Aha, thanks for that info :slight_smile:

Now I am wondering if it was the sweet spot being out of line with my eye that caused my issue with the 4K. Distinct possibility, because sometimes things were pretty clear, but not often. Especially, as I like to look around by moving my eyes. That probably would have caused the eye strain. Damn!