BTW, the godray’s are better visible if you’re not looking through the center of the lens. If you’re looking through the sweet spot there aren’t a lot of godray’s at all, I think that’s why I haven’t been noticing them lately.
Anyway, this hands down is THE best HMD money can buy at the moment, of that I’m sure by now (although truth to be told, I haven’t tried the Odyssey). It’s overpriced, sure, but if you can miss the money, don’t look any further, it won’t get better than this.
Then again, IF the Pimax 8k would release any time soon, you’ll probably want to wait for that… But who knows when it will come, might take months, if not more … I’m starting to think Pimax will soon change ‘may’ into ‘june’ and who knows what happens after that…
god rays on the rift are ridiculous against black backgrounds on white lettering, menus etc. I hope Pimax have that problem eliminated on the 8K new lenses.
So I received my lenses + adapter today. Switching them is REALLY easy, you can just pop out the current lenses with a small screw driver and just pop the new ones in, I think I literally was done within 1 minute. However they left me very much unimpressed. Sure, godray’s are less noticeable but:
SDE is more pronounced with the Gear VR lenses
The lenses actually steamed up. Not sure why, this never happened with my original vive lenses but happened very quickly with the Gear VR ones
eye strain! I had my IPD measured professionally so when I use that value in my vive pro, my eyes feel very relaxed. However with those Gear VR lenses I almost immediately felt eye strain. I suspect that the lens+adapter are not aligned with the panel, so your eyes will look slightly cross-eyed.
I generally felt way less presence than with the Vive lenses. Not sure why, maybe it’s a combo of the factors above, but I felt much more like I was looking into a 3d world instead of being there.
And since I don’t even experience that much godray’s with my Vive pro (maybe also because I almost always run SteamVR in ‘night mode’, I actually like it a bit less bright, maybe got used to my Pimax 4k too much LOL), the choice was pretty much a nobrainer and I swapped the original lenses back for now.
Dont set Your normal IPD given from optician , use a lower values, in my case 64 is the best (67 from optician) the lens mods have a slightly different focus point and thus the scale used for IPD is no longer accurate
Not to contradict what you experienced with the lens Mod, but i’ve also done the gear vr lens to Vive mod and can honestly say i personally think there is a great improvement, I would recommend adding the V3 lens distortion parameters before passing final judgement. The one thing that sold me on it most and why i will never go back to the old original version fresnel is the sweet spot. With the old lenses there was such a small area in the center of the lens that I had to make sure I was looking through. With the gear VR lens I do not have to move my head always to maintain that sweet spot I can look within the headset at all angles with much more clarity and this is reported by many others as well.
I just tried it (params v1.4 for the Vive pro). And yes, it certainly fixed the ‘lack of presence’ that I described above, so that was really just a problem of wrong distortion profile. However within 30 seconds of trying I actually felt the eye strain again. I tried some different IPD settings but could find none that alleviated it. Also I really hate the extra noticeable SDE. With the original Vive Pro lenses, SDE isn’t really an issue anymore. It’s there but it doesn’t bother me at all. However with the Gear VR lenses it’s better noticeable and it’s actually bothering me again.
So long story short, the Gear VR fixes indeed godrays, adds clarity and indeed the sweet spot gets bigger. But you’ll get more noticable SDE with it and I couldn’t find a way to fix the eye strain that I’m feeling with those GearVR lenses. All-in-all I’m switching back to the Vive Pro lenses. I did notice the godrays all of sudden much more though, after having seen through the GearVR lenses …
That interesting and I’m glad you tried and were able to fix the distortion profile. My experience is similar only I haven’t experienced the eye strain yet. Thanks for sharing your experience.
I do wonder if it could be that the GearVR lens adaptors are not suitable for the Vive Pro. It has different distortion parameters and different panels so I wonder if the lens adaptors maybe need to position the lenses differently? I haven’t googled yet though how others liked the mod for the Vive Pro.
Any more testing with the barrel distortion? Do you still conclude the gear lenses are worse? Now the 8K is looking even less promising I’m going to pick up a Vive pro for dirt Rally. I guess the gear lenses would make that even more nausea inducing
I would say your jumping. There is a reason why its going through testing to refine things before launch. It would be foolish imho to go spend $1000 then find out potenially the 8k ships within a couple if months. But some have money to burn.
I would reccommend waiting for the official m1 test results before doing something rash based on gloryseekers’ need for 15m of infamy.
I also thinking to jump into Pro. I have GearVr lenses and adapter in orginal Vive and for me this huge improvement over frensels. The bigest adavntage I see in Elite Dangerous and other games with dark scenes or background, there is no god rays and sweetspot 2x biger than before. To be honest before lens swap I was using a feature in steamvr app named „night mode”which dim brightnes and reduce saturation but still after 2 hours in ED VR my eyes was tired and get blurred now with new lenses I spent 4~5 hours without any eyes problems. The bad for me is that I’m wearing glases inside Vr and have a bit les space inside with this mod.
The barrel distortion even after firmware replacemnt is there but is tiny and after couple days my eyes acommodated somehow in that way thay I can not see it anymore.
I remember the sense of presence I got in my DK2 from titans of space. It was the deep blacks with no glare. I didn’t really get that with the CV1 due to the god rays. Really want to try Elite with the lenses mod and 1600P panels
Well like I said, the Vive pro lens mod params fix the distortion. But the lenses increase SDE and I felt eyestrain that I never felt with the original lenses. But others seem to be happy so maybe it’s personal.
I always run my Vive Pro in “night mode”, just like @Yata_PL does. I find the brightness of the Vive Pro way too high for my taste so that’s why I prefer night mode. This has the added benefit that most of the god ray’s are diminished to a point where I don’t notice them anymore during gaming. So I like the original lenses much more my self.
That really depends on your situation, if you can easily miss the money I actually think it’s foolish to NOT buy the Vive pro and just hope on a best case scenario with the Pimax 8k which most likely will not happen. Also, if you have the Pro with the new V2 lighthouses then you’ll be all set for the Pimax 8k. And, who knows how good the Pimax 8k will be when released, it might actually not be better than the Vive Pro. For example if they can’t fix the IPD mechanism then I won’t even be able to use it. And I personally don’t see the Pimax 8k being released this year after the issue’s reported, but that’s of course just a personal guess.
Sure if its no miss. But otherwise could be a pc upgrade or other vr toys. Base point waiting until the beta is complete to a month is more cost effective.
But what happens after the beta is complete? I don’t think Pimax is going to lift the NDA if they need to fix things. What would be the use of a NDA if you just lift it after the beta is complete?