![]() ![]() Right now, it's bugged to hell, but forthcoming updates may or may not address this. There is no screen door effect to speak of, and text is more legible - if, big if, you can coax its pupil distance adjustment feature in the software into working correctly. Not relevalatory in practice, but enough to shift it from "if I squint I can just." to "oh hey, I can see basically clearly." This is a big win in theory. It's comparable to looking at 1080p where Vivulus is like watching 720p. Yes, in all honesty the picture is sharper and clearer than either of the major headsets. I should delay no longer: clearly the critical question is that of image quality. It's also a more convincingly high-def way of watching movies on a virtual cinema screen than the Vive or Rift if that's your bag, although that comes with several caveats. A ton of other stuff too, but my strong suspicion is that this headset will be of particular interest to sim fans who cannot countenance the high spend on a Vive or Rift given that they don't need any of the flappy-handed stuff for their game of choice. That means the likes of Elite Dangerous, American/European Truck Simulator and DCS World are all yours in VR for sub-£300. So yeah, in terms of games, if it's on Steam and doesn't require Vive wands, it'll work with this right out of the box. Reading up, it seems support for Oculus exclusives can be hacked in without huge exertion, but I'm spoilt enough for choice on Steam that I haven't bothered with this as yet. If a game uses pad or keyboard or mouse you're good to go - presuming it's a SteamVR game, anyway. No controller is included, though apparently Pimax are working on something, so before you even consider this thing you should bear in mind that it's not going to support anything that requires Vive controllers or Oculus' pointer thing. There is some grease on the nosepiece after using this and that is the only thing I can tell you about fluids) and its own, currently empty games store, which no-one will ever use. It also boasts some frippery such as 'auto-demisting' with some kind of blue laser (FWIW I have never been aware of misting or demisting on any headset I've tried. It also means that the only connections the device requires is one HDMI port and one USB 3.0 port (though 2.0 is supported to some extent, at what cost I do not know).įinally, there's an option for integrated headphones if you like, and it claims it can be adjusted to be usable without glasses by myopic folk - though there is space for glasses also. This closes the door on fancier-pants positional tracking but can map which direction your head's looking in. ![]() ![]() There's no base station or sensor or anything like that here - it just uses gyroscopes built into the headset, like the earliest Rifts did. I'll get onto how the image looks shortly, but first let's run through the other vital statistics.įOV is 110 degrees, on par with the big lads, while refresh rate (and therefore maximum frame rate) is 60 down from 90. (And thank God, because almost no PC in the world could possibly power full-4K VR right now). So a big step up for sure, but in practice we're more in 1440p or 2K territory than 4K. However, this is the total resolution - the more telling figure to bear in mind is the per eye resolution, which is 1,080 x 1,200 on Vive and Rift and, as far as I can ascertain, 1920x2160 on the Pimax. The resolution is 3840x2160, up from Oculus and Vive's 2160 x 1200. You'll be wanting the nuts and bolts of the thing first, I imagine. 1) Can it really solve the image quality problem? 2) Can it really do what it needs to at half the price of the big boys of VR? I've been testing the Pimax for the last few days, and here's what I think. It's also $350 (or $300 without headphones), compared to the Rift's $599 and Vive's $799. In the interim, here's Chinese outfit Pimax, who are selling what they label as the first 4K VR headset for PC, which works with SteamVR. The tech will be refined over time (unless the market totally loses faith in the concept), but whether that is achieved by Oculus, Valve/HTC or someone else entirely is very much up for grabs still. But those constitute just the first consumer generation of hardware. Both Oculus Rift and the Vive offer a real jolly good time for initial forays into lifesize 3D wonderlands, but come up short when it comes to longer term usage, for reasons we've opined about at length here and here. Headaches and nauseau? High system requirements? Too many cables? Screen door effect? Apparent low resolutions? Gimmicky games? Problematic prices? Your face in a box? I could go on, but I won't because, er, that is most of them. Stick your hand into the Tombola Of VR Woes and see what you grab. ![]()
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