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The Index thread (please keep to subject)

Techy111
MVP
MVP
As per the title, please respect the users who post here and keep it on topic, any nonsense and......grrr
A PC with lots of gadgets inside and a thing to see in 3D that you put on your head.

2,973 REPLIES 2,973

kevinw729
Honored Visionary

RuneSR2 said:

Hmmm, Left 4 Dead could be interesting...
.....



Agree, that was a well presented and interesting summation of the situation as well as looking at the needed timeline. I like the comment about needing to keep momentum towards encouraging other developers to create content. Also have to question what this could have been if rather than waiting on the INDEX they had gone with supporting the VIVE with this content - seems the game was available a year ago, but was drawn out because it was given lesser resources?

Though the author alludes too "all boats floating with the tide" - I think we can see that Valve INDEX is seeing the biggest push from regained interest in playing HLA. Its going to be hard to not see this fueling a new "PC-masterrace" element to the VR community. Looking forward to seeing those Steam survey data for the end of the year (let alone March). Especially if by then the L4D news also drops.  
https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

Maxxgold
Rising Star

If anyone that has a Valve Index is looking for an amazing 3D mod. Check this out. It moves a very small amount of air into your headset. Not enough air to dry your eyes, but just enough to give you a refreshing feeling while playing VR, and an added bonus of helping with fogged lenses.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4012790

Calibos
Heroic Explorer

RuneSR2 said:

Watched a few movies using BigScreen Revive with Index res 200%, (= solid 90 fps) and it's close to being in a theater. But one movie was mkv another mp4, although 1080p it's just not good enough. You need 4K.
But that's just me, I'm sure many persons with little knowledge about VR would be totally blown away. With 4K and virtual surround sound I think Index might be really close to IMAX at home 😉


Given Bigscreens atrocious Remote Desktop network Stack I wouldn't trust their Virtual Desktop Software stack either anymore.

I bought an Oculus GO for Virtual Cinema in the Primeday sales a few months ago and found Bigscreens remote Desktop functionality beyond terrible. Mouse Lagging by seconds and moving compression artifacts on a still desktop image FFS!! Don't get me started on actual Video!! Guy Godins Virtual Desktop on the other hand was a revelation on the GO. Zero latency and no visible compression artifacts. As good as a wired HMD. I even ended up using GO Virtual Desktops amazing SteamVR Game streaming functionality to stream the Desktop SteamVR version of Virtual Desktop to the Go version so that I could use the resource intensive HighMax Virtual Cinema DLC. Its an accurate recreation of the largest iMAX cinema in the world at Darling Harbour in Sydney Australia with its 500 seats and 100ft widescreen. Watched the entire 23 movie Marvel Cinematic Universe roster of movies in 3D in that Virtual Cinema using KODI as my Library manager, UI and player and outputting real 5.1 audio to my real 5.1 Home Theater System. Its was GLORIOUS!!.

While I understand GO doesn't have full panel utilisation, the fact that the Virtual screen height takes up over half the FOV and the vertical res of the GO is 1440 pixels, the Virtual screen is using about 720 of them and I do believe it looks close to an effective 720p res to my eyes. GO with its 2560x1440 RGB Stripe LCD certainly passed an image quality and clarity threshold for me that my 2160x1200 Pentile OLED CV1 never could with its SDE and all its weird OLED colour banding and blocky colour artifacts in dark areas of the environment and in dark scenes on screen.

I have a HP Reverb on the way thanks to the BF sales and expect its 2160 vertical res and 2160 horizontal res (compared to CV1/GO's 1080/1280 horizontal res per eye) to deliver an effective 1080p quality experience to my eyes.

Which leads me to my final point. Why do you think you'll need 4K content to do the Index nevermind the Reverb justice? The Virtual screens will be an effective 1080p res at best. My experience is already glorious with an effective 720p on GO. It'll take Michael Abrashs' mythical future 4000x4000 pixel per eye HMD to have any chance of replicating a 4K (3820x2160) screen inside VR. Don't assume the need for downsampling 4K source material for a Virtual Cinema when the issue you have could simply be down to Bigscreen just not being a very Good Virtual Cinema/Virtual Desktop app from a technical standpoint outside of its social functionality. John Carmack actually namechecked Guy Godin of Virtual Desktop  in his OC6 keynote as always being the first to implement any of Carmacks magical software features like Cylindrical layers and he has already integrated Carmacks Oculus Link Foveated Compression technology into Virtual Desktops Wireless Remote Desktop functionality for Go and Quest.

I have high hopes for tethered Desktop SteamVR Virtual Desktop and the Highmax Virtual Cinema on my new HP Reverb. I've already got real 5.1 audio sorted and don't need to wait for personalised HRTF HMD's and a proper Multichannel audio format to VR positional audio transcoding solution. (Though I admit that once they crack that along with the Res/Visuals we've hit the Virtual Cinema Holy Grail of replicating both the visual and audio experience of the real cinema inside VR and with the aid of tactile transducers in our seats not disturbing someone in the next room nevermind not having to worry about a neighbour knocking on our door complaining that our 5.1 system and subwoofer have vibrated his picture frames of his livingroom wall)

RuneSR2
Grand Champion
All the 1080p (compressed) movies I tried in the Index looked horribly low-res and that's not caused by the HMD. Showing 1080p using Big Screen or other players feels much like sitting in a real theater watching a blu-ray movie - without any 4K upscaling, and it does not look very good. Much the same bad res I get when watching some 1080p content with my 4K 85" tv, but there the 4K upscaling often helps a lot. The movie image size in the Index is so big that I need to turn my head if I want to see everything - just like sitting in the center of an Imax theater - so the movie image size is much bigger than Index can display within it's native res and fov restrictions. That's why 1080p does not look very good when shown is such a large format (like zoomed in), it lacks detail - I guess that's why you don't get 1080p in your local Imax theater 😉 I think Reverb will need 4K content to shine the most too, unless we somehow can get awesome 2k to 4k upscaling working.

BigScreen is kinda horrible, I gave up using both Touch or Knuckles and just use a normal mouse for starting movies. But I like The Void and I can get a really big screen, lol.

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

Shadowmask72
Honored Visionary
Most if not all of my videos I capture are 4K and when played back on any VR headset look pretty awesome. You really are restricted by the source video not necessarily the resolution of the headset.


System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.

Calibos
Heroic Explorer

RuneSR2 said:

All the 1080p (compressed) movies I tried in the Index looked horribly low-res and that's not caused by the HMD. Showing 1080p using Big Screen or other players feels much like sitting in a real theater watching a blu-ray movie - without any 4K upscaling, and it does not look very good. Much the same bad res I get when watching some 1080p content with my 4K 85" tv, but there the 4K upscaling often helps a lot. The movie image size in the Index is so big that I need to turn my head if I want to see everything - just like sitting in the center of an Imax theater - so the movie image size is much bigger than Index can display within it's native res and fov restrictions. That's why 1080p does not look very good when shown is such a large format (like zoomed in), it lacks detail - I guess that's why you don't get 1080p in your local Imax theater 😉 I think Reverb will need 4K content to shine the most too, unless we somehow can get awesome 2k to 4k upscaling working.

BigScreen is kinda horrible, I gave up using both Touch or Knuckles and just use a normal mouse for starting movies. But I like The Void and I can get a really big screen, lol.


In 'The Real World', the number of pixels that make up the image doesn't change no matter how close or far away from the screen you sit. You need 4K minimum in a real Cinema for a respectable experience because the folks sitting in the front row are close enough to the screen to resolve the pixels and SDE to an image quality destroying degree if the Cinema is still running a crappy 2K cinema projector. 4K in a real Cinema isn't ideal either but its a lot better than 2K. THX's old recommendations for the best seating position in Theaters during the 35mm film era was all based on best viewing angle and Screen Size to visual FOV ratio's. The effective 16K res of 35mm film meant resolution of the image was never an issue no matter where you sat in the CInema even up front. The move to Digital 2K and 4K projectors meant that the middle seat in the middle row of the Cinema was now not just the best seat in the house from a Screen size to FOV ratio point of view but now also from a Screen Size to FOV to SDE ratio point of view too.

Thats not the case in VR. You aren't 'Zooming' in or out on the pixels by picking a Virtual seating position closer or further away from the Virtual Screen. In fact, the closer you sit Virtually to the screen and the more the Virtual Screen fills your FOV, the more pixels of your VR HMD you are using to actually display the movie image and the less you are using to draw the environment around the screen. You 'INCREASE' the resolution of the Movie image by picking a Virtual seat closer to the Virtual screen if the Virtual Cinema app allows it.

Look, I can't rule out that using 4K source material and its effective downsampling for display on a Virtual Screen thats using 1920x1080 of a Reverbs 2160x2160 pixels isn't going to improve the image quality. We all know how Super Sampling games in our VR HMD's can improve things especially text. However, watching 1080p media content on a 100ft wide 60ft tall Virtual iMAX screen is NOT the same as watching 1080P content on a real life 100ft x 60ft real Cinema screen. In a Virtual Cinema the further you sit from the Virtual Screen the less pixels go to make up the image and the greater each individual pixels size is relative to the size of the screen, whereas in a real Cinema the further you sit the smaller the pixels and the closer you sit the larger the pixels appear to be.

Don't worry, I'm going to try some 4K content in the HighMax Virtual Cinema in Virtual Desktop on my Reverb when I get it but I'm not expecting much of a difference and don't reckon I am going to feel the need to replace all my media with the 4K versions.

Borscht4eVR
Heroic Explorer

Calibos said:

You need 4K minimum in a real Cinema for a respectable experience because the folks sitting in the front row are close enough to the screen to resolve the pixels and SDE to an image quality destroying degree if the Cinema is still running a crappy 2K cinema projector. 4K in a real Cinema isn't ideal either but its a lot better than 2K. 


As of 2 years ago, globally the number of installed 4K projectors is 27,500, comprising just 17% of total screens worldwide.

Sony took the lead in supporting 4K with its vertically integrated business. Its global fleet of roughly 17,000 projectors is 4K compliant, while only 10% of projectors sold by Barco, Christie and NEC are 4K.

According to analytics company IHS Markit, the markets with the highest penetration of 4K digital projection are the US (40%), Thailand (35%) and Estonia (52% of a small total base). In the UK, 32% of screens are 4K.

I've no idea what the numbers are like here in Canada, but 1980 seems to be in vast majority

Borscht4eVR
Heroic Explorer
Clickgate is back =(

Just received my Index kit, and the left controller's thumbstick doesn't click in the leftmost position. All other positions work. Right thumbstick is OK too.

Kinda bites, especially given that here in Canada the kit costs $1,477 after all is said and done.

Oh, and 28 cents too, if anyone is counting pennies 😛

Anonymous
Not applicable


Kinda bites, especially given that here in Canada the kit costs $1,477 after all is said and done.

Oh, and 28 cents too, if anyone is counting pennies 😛



So...$1,319...plus 12% tax. Are you BC or Manitoba? And I'm assuming shipping was included? Or...less tax, with shipping extra?

Borscht4eVR
Heroic Explorer

Spuzzum said:
So...$1,319...plus 12% tax. Are you BC or Manitoba? And I'm assuming shipping was included? Or...less tax, with shipping extra?


Vancouver, BC. $1,477.28 from click to doorstep.

I must say, I'm 3 hours in and a little miffed with the Index experience so far. So far I owned Gear VR, Google Daydream, Rift, Rift S, a Quest, and now an Index, and I was expecting more. 

It's a great headset don't get me wrong. But at $500 (Rift S), is Index really 3 times better? I'm positive the answer is no. Not even 2 times better.

I'm definitely keeping it though. I have an IPD of a bovine, and finally getting the clarity in my periphery is not something I'm willing to give up. But the cables (oh my, cables galore), the bulky plug 3 ft down the cable, the glare, the comfort (not as good as Rift S - again, bovine head here), and the lack of click on my controller (c'mon Valve, wtf) - it just burns looking at that number.

I'm probably going to get crucified in this thread for saying so, but for any lurkers here who are considering buying an Index, maybe think twice about getting one right now. I'd wait a bit, and maybe get a used one.

If I were made of money I'd keep all these headsets cause the one to rule them doesn't yet exist. They all have a different edge where they shine. But I can't justify holding onto all of them either. So the plan right now is to sell my Rift S and use Oculus Quest with a link cable for Oculus titles in my library. Which bites, cause I just finished modding Rift S with headphones and the darn thing is so much more comfortable than anything else I got.