Re: VR!
Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2023 8:39 pm
Soooo I bought a Quest 3. As soon as reviews hit that said the lenses were basically invisible, and that the image was clear almost edge-to-edge, I knew I wanted one. The Reverb G2 I've been using for several years had a great screen, but the sweet spot of the lenses in which even just the centre of your vision is sharp is tiny, so if your head movement shakes the headset enough to move it on your head by even a tiny amount, your vision goes blurry. The cable too is a literal pain in the neck, being both quite thick, and connected in a stupid place (basically at your temple) meaning any time you catch it on something you end up yanking your head to one side.
First impressions of the Quest 3 were extremely positive. It's actually a slightly lower resolution screen than the G2 has, but the lenses are so clear, and the sweet spot so generous, that it's substantially sharper in practice. It's intended for mixed reality as much as virtual, and the passthrough cameras are good enough that you can read your phone screen through them, albeit with a little warping if there's much movement - the algorithm that gives you binocular vision is good at a distance, but anything close to the cameras wobbles a lot. You can also use your hands in place of the controllers, which is useful if, for example, you're doing the washing up while watching a Youtube video and you don't want to dry your hands to click on something. Ask me how I know that. But there's a definite wow-factor in having a virtual display hang absolutely perfectly in space. I can walk downstairs to grab something from the kitchen, come back upstairs, and find my virtual window in exactly the same place that I left it - it's almost spooky, and I don't know how they've made the positional tracking that accurate.
This is, strictly speaking, a different category of product to the Reverb, being a fully-contained standalone console. I've only played a couple of games on it so far; Robo Recall, which was actually released for the original Oculus Rift with a Quest 1 version, but it's something I've played before so I can compare the experience. Being freed from the cable is just straight-up better - you don't need to be conscious of the cable, getting it snagged on something and ripping the headset off or breaking something, and you can twist and dodge to your hearts content. It looks like arse compared to the PC version, but then it was condensed to run on mobile hardware from 2019, but it's every bit as fluid and playable. I'd love them to give it a Quest 3 makeover. I did also play a little shooter called Swarm... something, which has you swooping and diving with a pair of grapple guns and no surfaces to land on - I have extremely good VR legs, but even I felt the odd pang of dizziness playing this, but it's pretty good fun for a quick blast.
And then there's the PC connectivity. You can do it with a cable, but sod that, frankly. You do need to buy Virtual Desktop from the Quest store (about twelve quid), but it's amazingly easy to get working. You run an app on the PC, just make sure you're on the same network, and bam, you have your PC screen mirrored inside the headset. You can select environemts like a cinema to run it in, but as this was intended for my sim racing and flying, I used the passthrough cameras and had a giant virtual monitor sitting atop my steering wheel setup (a video I took to show Snowy the issues I was having with the new Forza's force feedback and controls - don't judge my awful performance). This is fine... until you try to run an actual VR game rather than a 2D one on a virtual screen. I'd been connecting directly to my PC's wireless card as I thought it would help with latency, but Windows just can't replicate a good router, and it was entirely unplayable in games that were pushing the PC itself. I checked the bandwidth, and despite being a Wifi 6 connection, I was only getting a fifth of the needed bandwidth.
I've bought myself a Wifi 6 access point, stuck it under my desk, and it's every bit as smooth as in a wired headset. There's some compromise in image quality (the best Wifi in the world can't come within a fifth of the bandwidth of display port - the image must be compressed), but it's entirely useable, but there are a couple of quality settings above the one I tested with (which Virtual Desktop suggest requires a 3090 or 4090). It's worth a loss of a little fidelity, particularly at a distance in a game like F1 2023, to be able to actually use my wing mirrors. The problems with the Reverb's lenses meant that to focus on anything, you had to move your entire head to look directly at it, and that's just not possible when cornering in an F1 car because you need to be looking for the apex of the corner. Now I can just glance left or right by moving my eyeballs like an actual human being. The field of view is just slightly wider too, meaning I get the full wing mirror without turning my head.
There are a few negatives - the audio pipes that Oculus have used since the Rift S just aren't as punchy as the fantastic speakers on the Reverb or Rift CV1, even if they've gotten significantly better in the intervening years, and the headstrap that comes with it needs immediate replacement as it's head-ache inducingly bad if you don't set it up just right (literally, it's like having your head in a vice). You need to add about £90 to the price of the headset (for Virtual Desktop, the Wifi 6 AP if you don't have one, and a third-party strap that's getting good reviews) if you want to do what I'm doing with it. You do of course also have to hold your nose and enter the Meta ecosystem, though as I missed the period where you had to tie your Oculus account to your Facebook one, there is at least a degree of separation there as my two accounts aren't linked.
Anyway, dissertation over. I'm very impressed with it.
First impressions of the Quest 3 were extremely positive. It's actually a slightly lower resolution screen than the G2 has, but the lenses are so clear, and the sweet spot so generous, that it's substantially sharper in practice. It's intended for mixed reality as much as virtual, and the passthrough cameras are good enough that you can read your phone screen through them, albeit with a little warping if there's much movement - the algorithm that gives you binocular vision is good at a distance, but anything close to the cameras wobbles a lot. You can also use your hands in place of the controllers, which is useful if, for example, you're doing the washing up while watching a Youtube video and you don't want to dry your hands to click on something. Ask me how I know that. But there's a definite wow-factor in having a virtual display hang absolutely perfectly in space. I can walk downstairs to grab something from the kitchen, come back upstairs, and find my virtual window in exactly the same place that I left it - it's almost spooky, and I don't know how they've made the positional tracking that accurate.
This is, strictly speaking, a different category of product to the Reverb, being a fully-contained standalone console. I've only played a couple of games on it so far; Robo Recall, which was actually released for the original Oculus Rift with a Quest 1 version, but it's something I've played before so I can compare the experience. Being freed from the cable is just straight-up better - you don't need to be conscious of the cable, getting it snagged on something and ripping the headset off or breaking something, and you can twist and dodge to your hearts content. It looks like arse compared to the PC version, but then it was condensed to run on mobile hardware from 2019, but it's every bit as fluid and playable. I'd love them to give it a Quest 3 makeover. I did also play a little shooter called Swarm... something, which has you swooping and diving with a pair of grapple guns and no surfaces to land on - I have extremely good VR legs, but even I felt the odd pang of dizziness playing this, but it's pretty good fun for a quick blast.
And then there's the PC connectivity. You can do it with a cable, but sod that, frankly. You do need to buy Virtual Desktop from the Quest store (about twelve quid), but it's amazingly easy to get working. You run an app on the PC, just make sure you're on the same network, and bam, you have your PC screen mirrored inside the headset. You can select environemts like a cinema to run it in, but as this was intended for my sim racing and flying, I used the passthrough cameras and had a giant virtual monitor sitting atop my steering wheel setup (a video I took to show Snowy the issues I was having with the new Forza's force feedback and controls - don't judge my awful performance). This is fine... until you try to run an actual VR game rather than a 2D one on a virtual screen. I'd been connecting directly to my PC's wireless card as I thought it would help with latency, but Windows just can't replicate a good router, and it was entirely unplayable in games that were pushing the PC itself. I checked the bandwidth, and despite being a Wifi 6 connection, I was only getting a fifth of the needed bandwidth.
I've bought myself a Wifi 6 access point, stuck it under my desk, and it's every bit as smooth as in a wired headset. There's some compromise in image quality (the best Wifi in the world can't come within a fifth of the bandwidth of display port - the image must be compressed), but it's entirely useable, but there are a couple of quality settings above the one I tested with (which Virtual Desktop suggest requires a 3090 or 4090). It's worth a loss of a little fidelity, particularly at a distance in a game like F1 2023, to be able to actually use my wing mirrors. The problems with the Reverb's lenses meant that to focus on anything, you had to move your entire head to look directly at it, and that's just not possible when cornering in an F1 car because you need to be looking for the apex of the corner. Now I can just glance left or right by moving my eyeballs like an actual human being. The field of view is just slightly wider too, meaning I get the full wing mirror without turning my head.
There are a few negatives - the audio pipes that Oculus have used since the Rift S just aren't as punchy as the fantastic speakers on the Reverb or Rift CV1, even if they've gotten significantly better in the intervening years, and the headstrap that comes with it needs immediate replacement as it's head-ache inducingly bad if you don't set it up just right (literally, it's like having your head in a vice). You need to add about £90 to the price of the headset (for Virtual Desktop, the Wifi 6 AP if you don't have one, and a third-party strap that's getting good reviews) if you want to do what I'm doing with it. You do of course also have to hold your nose and enter the Meta ecosystem, though as I missed the period where you had to tie your Oculus account to your Facebook one, there is at least a degree of separation there as my two accounts aren't linked.
Anyway, dissertation over. I'm very impressed with it.