DK2 8 hours in...talk me off the ledge.

[dvs2nite]

Honesty policy - Dk2 shipped with a dead pixel in center of screen and the right rail shifts and wiggles all out of the box. Great way to make someone feel good about your product is have quality control and Oculus has zero QC on their products. I was hoping I was would be lucky and avoid the many poor product complaints on here but alas that was not to be. Lenses scratched in the first hour but its easy to ignore.

So let me give the background very quickly. I had no trouble setting up the rift to run any of the demos and games I tried to run.
Virtual Desktop
The chair: Sightline
Live for speed
Elite: Dangerous

Maybe an hour unboxing and fiddling with the software, Bliago's manager, IPD measurements and the demo scene.

So I get everything fired up and start trying the different stuff out. I figure I must be doing it wrong because everything looks pretty crappy in pretty much every sense.

Another hour of fiddling with IPD, forced vsync and physical adjustments.

Still no dice and it's at this point I realize that there isn't anything wrong.

Live for Speed is the first demo I try because I am told it doesn't have a huge problem with the sdk. Sure enough It looks just like its supposed to and runs very very smooth. however the only part that does look good is in a very small cone in the center of the rift. If I look at any of the edges I get blurry out of focus and unreadable screen. Move eyes back to center and its ok again. In driving sims this is a best case scenario for the rift. You dont really have time to be looking around a ton and your narrow focus is usually on the area directly in front of you. I just really dont want to spend my time in a racing game from 1998. Presence is pretty good here.

Elite: Dangerous is next up. Same as Live for Speed, a small cone in the center of the screen looks ok and blurry everywhere else. Text is garbage in the game unless you lean in then it just looks slightly better. The sense of presence is amazing and you really get a sense of what it would be like to live in a sci-fi space trucking adventure with unbelievably poor vision.

The Chair: Sightline This is the best demo I tried. It suffers from the least amount of poor graphics because they are really really low quality already. The narrow cone of good resolution is least apparent in this demo as well. Presence in this game is almost immediate and it is amazing. This is the experience I have seen described and the potential this device has. This was probably the only plus experience over a 40" monitor and it wasn't really worth the effort.

I am already going to cancel the other rift's I ordered. What I am looking for is a reason to care about CV1. DK2 is pretty much awful. I have no idea what people saw in DK1 that could have gave them even a shot at DK2.

The hype train has never been so unbelievably delusional. When Google was putting out a cardboard box with a phone taped in I thought it was a joke...the DK2 is a marginally better experience. I guess for some people that margin is worth a lot of money. I bought a 280$ Samsung 39" TV and hooked it up to my computer...it looks a few orders of magnitude better than the 350$ Samsung phone I hooked up to my computer.

[dvs2nite]

Thanks again guys. I will see about having my IPD checked by an optician...or is it optometrist? either way it should be free right? Never been to an eye doctor. I only remember the other stuff from when they measured it in the service. It may be different 20 years on.

[mrcrisp]

"dvs2nite" wrote:
Thanks again guys. I will see about having my IPD checked by an optician...or is it optometrist? either way it should be free right? Never been to an eye doctor. I only remember the other stuff from when they measured it in the service. It may be different 20 years on.

It is suggested to visit opticians and have ones eyes checked every two years, even if you do not require glasses.
There are more conditions than just requiring prescription lenses that any good optician (and really bad one's too I imagine) will be able to advise you on.

I have known many people who have visited an opticians and never thought they needed glasses- only to have come out requiring a pair. :mrgreen:

[carlhoward]

OP: It sounds like you may be experiencing aberations/distortions due to a larger than normal IPD. Some people have modified their DK2s to adjust for large IPD, but hopefully the CV1 will have a build-in adjustment for this.

[CyberCub]

The one thing I will agree with on the OP is QQ. My right rail is also extremely lose right out the box! The left is just fine. There must be a trend of this out there yes? No dead pixels here for me though!

[ThreeEyes]

I have a cheap plastic micrometer (about $2.50 on Amazon) that I use for anything where I might hurt my good one, but it also has a benefit of not having the really sharp edges or points to the jaws. It works great for measuring IPD. Just look in a mirror and line each jaw up with the centers of my pupils and read the distance off the scale. Works great.

Also, the larger lenses of DK2 are supposed to be more tolerant of physical IPD. You just need to make sure you have the right measurement in the config util (for apps that read it). There is also a guy over on Reddit who has published the 3D printer files for IPD adjusters that you unlatch your lenses, latch these in, and then latch your lenses into the adjusters. I think it gets you an extra few mm of adjustment.

[Shigawire]

"cybercub" wrote:
The one thing I will agree with on the OP is QQ. My right rail is also extremely lose right out the box! The left is just fine. There must be a trend of this out there yes? No dead pixels here for me though!

I've also experienced that the right rail can be slightly loose compared to the left one. But it isn't a big issue for me.

[Shigawire]

Hey OP, check this out. Could be something that helps you with this problem 😄


viewtopic.php?f=30&t=6704

[willste]

"dvs2nite" wrote:
Thanks to all of the posters here. The ones who are angry are legitimately so at my lack of ability to communicate properly. Some of you have said some things that do make me feel better. To the other I wish I could tell you exactly the problem.

The low quality of the product isnt a problem for me. Electronics are always flimsy in early iterations. I actually added the part about the pixel last but for some dumb reason put it at top. I have no doubt I will get a replacement in a month or so from them.

My problem is that low persistance and positional tracking are definitely not as huge as people are saying. Elite Looks a lot better on a flat screen and the immersion\presence is a game changer but not on such a small screen. Once you get everything looking great and working great you still have a lower quality and blurry edged experience compared to a crappy flat screen TV never mind a 1440 oled monitor.

I honestly expected 1080p oled DK2 to be as good as my 1080p oled TV. maybe when i get my replacement it will be.
As of right now though I fear that CV1 will need way way to much hardware to function. In order to fix the basic design problems of the DK2 it will need to be at least twice the actual screen size and weigh about a 1\3 of the current model. Also it will need to do all that on a nvidia 760 (or equivalent) at a maximum. Telling everyone who buys a CV1 that a 780 is the minimum would be product suicide.

I'll try to ease your mind. Yes you made one big mistake and that was expecting the 1080p OLED on the Rift would be anything like a 1080p OLED TV. It is, if you stick your eyeball against the TV and use a magnifying glass on half of it. This is probably the number one reason Oculus kept saying wait for CV1 if you are not a developer. The resolution doesn't give anywhere near the image quality of a standard monitor. This makes it rough in a game like Elite Dangerous where most of the objects are distant and blurry.

For CV1 we have been promised higher resolution. If they do end up giving us a 4k OLED no one knows how it will look or how it will run so there is currently a lot of debate on if its even technically reasonable or possible. I feel like they wouldn't have said wait for CV1 if they didn't feel like a lot of people would have a reaction similar to yours. If they deliever on their promise CV1 should be an all around drastically better experience.

Refined tracking,
Better resolution,
No more SDE, which implies a satisfying resolution
Better screen,
Lighter,
Wider FOV
Higher Frame Rate
Better design solutions to lens and IPD issues
ect...

If you want to be depressed again. There may well be some hard limits on what they can release because gaming hardware simply can't handle modern games at specs much higher than DK2 at the fidelity we are used to. It remains to be seen how they will reconcile current computing power with CV1 capabilities. I for one hope they shoot for the moon and trust that hardware will catch up, as long as we can scale back to get a good experience on slower machines.

[pierreye]

If anyone expect the DK2 to be as sharp as a monitor or tv, I don't think that would happen with current DK2 or coming CV1. It's not going to be pixel perfect and great focus from edge to edge. Personally I wouldn't watch a movie with DK2 as I prefer full HD resolution that is in focus edge to edge without distortion using a projector. Having said that, DK2 is absolutely fantastic with proper head tracking support demo and game. The presence and ability to look around is nothing I had try before. The FOV is crazy and scale of object is realistic compare to Sony HMZ-T1. If you want to compare pixel sharpness, HMZ-T1 is better but with DK2, you feel you are there. So ask yourself if you want a display that is sharp from edge to edge, then DK2 is not for you. I doubt CV1 would improve leap and bound even if they switch to 1440p as the major challenge would be the lens that could provide perfect focus for each individual would be difficult to produce unless it's custom make for every eye. But for VR experience, this is as good as it gets.

[monsterfurby]

I suppose eventually the best solution to the performance issues would be including a supplementary GPU in the Rift itself, in some way, to help assist with rendering. Of course the Rift will always be demanding in terms of hardware requirements, but I guess once UHD-displays become more common and less expensive (and the most recent USB standard more widespread), there might be room to think about how to best ease the load on the PC itself.