BigScreen Beyond: 3 Months Later...

I've had to re-record this video multiple times because I really cannot get this video down in a way I feel is good enough to explain the product hopefully this time is different well if you're watching it on YouTube it probably is hi I'm Brad and this is a follow-up video to my first kind of preview of the big screen Beyond I did about three months ago at that time I had the device for around a couple weeks but I spent many hours during that time using it however I always like to revisit products at a longer time scale because you can really get all the kings and hitches and really get used to the device in ways that a couple weeks just you just can't and I want to preface this entire video by saying this device is still by choice my daily driver for everything I do in Virtual Reality on the PC which is pretty much all my time in virtual reality is on the PC as well anyway however there's some new context points I also want to touch on since we've had a lot of big announcements in the industry since this video first video came out basically we've had the Apple headset which is uses a very similar technology display wise to this we've had the quest 3 announcement with the price tag confirmed and a few other things related to just in general what we might see as sort of a aftermarket solutions for this headset and kind of other bad news for the lighthouse ecosystem depending on how you look at it more importantly than any of those things I just said was the fact that the first pre-order emails to get a face can have started going out now and I think it's really important for the people that have already pre-ordered this thing to know exactly what they're getting before they sell a thousand dollars well I am very happy with the device and everything it does it does have caveats I feel need to be communicated clearly just to make sure you don't run into any issues now of course I want to start with the most important selling aspect of this device which is obviously the Comfort value is extremely light headset and it really does have a nice feel to it when you wear it for long extended periods of time in fact I realize that this is almost the most disruptive headset in the industry I've tried in a while because of how light it is I've tried other headsets new and old since I've been using this thing for long periods of time and it's always like yeah this thing has caveats at the other headsets don't have but at the same time this thing is so light how do you put these kind of things on a scale next to these things it was really clever a big screen who is a small startup company to focus on something with a small scope that was more easily achievable I see companies with these giant large scopes with kind of packing every single feature as they can but really these company sizes if you're not someone like meta or apple or valve to do all these things it's really extremely hard so I really do think it was smart a big screen to start small focus on one thing and deliver that experience the best way they can now due to the fact that they are a startup company and they do have some custom stuff going on there they don't have nearly as much access to the sort of components in the engineering that these big companies do so when they release a headset like this you're going to have sacrifices to other pieces of quality in your experience the biggest problem I run into daily with this hmd it's the first day I got it is there's still no audio solution now they are promising one as a uh sort of an accessory and audio strap but I still haven't tried it I haven't seen any prototypes yet of it and it's still just not visible to me so when you get this HD you are reliant on whatever audio sources you have and for my opinion using a big pair of cans whether Wireless or wired is not a good experience wearing the headset what I've learned is wireless earbuds are actually the best way to use this hmd these are not this is not a sponsorship or anything but I I am using a some cool earbuds called gfits and they kind of fit this hmd very well because once you put them in your ear you activate a little button and they shine ultraviolet light to mold it to your ear for the first use and for whenever after that so it kind of fits with this whole customized scheme the main reason why I prefer using earbuds with this device compared to any other audio so far is mainly because the biggest benefit not only due to the Comfort that's kind of not being talked about is the naturalness of actually wearing this thing in VR is a big factor because a lot of headsets that you wear all the time when you move your head a lot there's this little bit of judder it takes a little bit of time for the headset to stay settle on your head no matter how tight or how correct you got a strap set up because a lot of these headsets are just bulky and front heavy in general even the quest Pro which is using pancake lenses I notice whenever I wear that hmd where I do want to recover this hmd because a lot of changes have happened to the quest Pro since I made my review almost a year ago there is this constant feeling that things don't feel as natural because things are just not able to quickly stay in the same place as you move your head but with this hmd not only is the weight low but the center of gravity is so close to your face that things feel very extremely natural in a way that kind of makes up for its other sort of visual shortcomings that might make you feel uncomfortable I remember the first day I got my Beyond I started using it here at the house and I didn't talk about this in my first video was I was actually kind of walking around and tripping over things more because my brain has kind of settled to expect such a huge weight in front of me or when I was walking around VR with something this light and something more natural my brain was expecting to compensate for weight that was not there so I was just kind of drunk for a little bit now obviously that went away within 30 minutes but something I thought was funny I needed to share here but I think the maximum amount of comfort you can get all this hmd is again with a top strap now when I first did my first video I talked about how I did a DIY top strap that went from left to right because mainly it was nice to get the pressure off of your ears because as you move your head around this strap over here while it's an okay material will still rub up against your your ears on the top of your ears if you do any sort of head movement at all not a problem if you use Sims or your main simmer which I've heard from simmer communities that people who have beta tested this thing this is a good simmers headset my hypothesis was even at a low weight like this you don't want to go for the glass of strap form factor you really always want to have some sort of top strap or some sort of pressure being alleviated from the top of your head and I'm really really happy to see that big screen is actually updated their plans to include an optional top strap that goes left and right in the box with the same material that the actual around your head strap is which means most people will have a very good experience with things not touching their ears which is awesome you might have noticed that I've actually uh made some changes to my Beyond in ways that might feel either ugly disgusting or however way you might feel about it and one of those changes was I actually did add a top front and back strap because big screen has allowed people to download the official CAD files for every component in this big screen Beyond so you can 3D print and make your own accessories or do whatever you want with it now I want to caveat this DIY section by kind of giving some more information on some limits to what you might be able to add on later so uh while I did attach a Leap Motion controller 2 to the Beyond to do some controllerless finger tracking and it worked there's two different USB C ports that I think is important to kind of go into detail of how they actually are used and what standards they are being powered by so one of them is the main actual PC VR tether that goes into a link box that splits into a single display port and two USBS a ports one of those usba ports is just for power delivery and it doesn't even need to be plugged into your PC even though they recommend that it can be plugged into like a power converter in your wall with some safety features maybe you might want to look into further if you do that and of course one of the usbas is for the power and data that actually sends the actual tracking data and everything back and forth between your PC and the headset however the other USBC Port is only a USB 2.0 standard so some uh wired editions that you might want the more bandwidth to actually do things such as what I've done to this it's going to run at a lower bandwidth so for example this device does actually work with a USB 2.0 but it runs at only half the bandwidth and half the refresh rates for the camera so if you're interested in this device and like modding it and adding things to it it's very important to be in be in mind that yes it is a USB 2.0 connection and going back into what I said about audio earlier there is no headphone jack they expect you if you want to directly plug in any wired headphones to this device that you're going to need a cable to convert a USB 2.0 C connection to a headphone jack which again adds more complexities and another cable which is another reason why I just kind of opted for the wireless earbuds directly to the PC the fun thing about aftermarket products is I've heard and pretty much got confirmation that no feo is actually going to bring their Wireless 6E Wi-Fi 60 uh connection that they're making for the valve index to the nofio kit um it was first leaked by a thrill seeker on the virtual reality show that this was being made and strats were actually being made to convert that little unit to fit on your nofio in case you want Wireless pcvr in this small form factor now obviously there's going to be some caveats because you're going to be adding a lot of that weight back to the hmd that you're losing but we'll see how that goes when the time comes and the hardest thing to add to this hmd which I'm really trying to figure out ways to fix was I really want to add eye tracking to this headset because I think eye tracking is the most important feature that is missing from this hmd in my opinion I think this is very just very gonna be used by people who love the idea of eye tracking every day whether it's for social VR use cases or not um and do the way the the actual uh head strap or the actual device is designed it's really hard to find any space to DIY something with like eye track VR the open source project to get in there I'm sure some people will figure it out but it's going to take a little more tinkering and ideas with different head straps to get there now let's get into the visuals I feel a lot of stuff that I said in my first video on the visuals have been mostly true up until this point however there's been some major changes to the Optics that have actually made it better since my first video with also some caveats there so my first video regarding fob I was talking about how even though it felt like the fov was around the Quest 2 my actual measurements comparisons eye to eye was the question which is slightly larger in terms of the horizontal and do all these complaints being made from the community about this low fov to actually get this low small form factor big screen Beyond quickly made some updates to their Optics so actually Edge out quite a bit more horizontal fob in the optical stack I'm happy to say I've had that sort of updated Optics unit for about a couple months now and I can't say it actually did have a big perceivable difference on how it felt in my first video I used VR chat's notorious mic icon in the UI being very blurry because it was right on the edge of my fov and this hmd which I'll go in a little bit later doesn't have the insane edge to edge Clarity like the pancake lenses as something like the quest Pro but as you can see here from these measurements I got it quite a bit difference of a horizontal fov than I did from in the first model I was reviewing now the vertical fov has pretty much stayed the same however I did complain in the first video that the fov seemed to be more focused toward the upwork position rather than the bottom position which I felt was more unnatural because humans are actually natural to look down just in case they don't step on any you know snakes on the ground from our monkey days and all that good stuff and they did fix that as well so things such as that mic icon that was complaining about from the VR chat UI being blurry in the first video is actually very manageable to have on all the time for at least my situation as a side note I still don't like when games and VR experiences do attach so many things to the face it's much better trying to attach them to the hands or arms or wrists but yeah that's unrelated anyway but there's actually a funny story about this whole fob Optics change I feel would be kind of interesting to share kind of talking about how they might have gotten to these Optics now they they definitely made some changes to the stack other than what I'm about to talk about but it was interesting because at one point I had around three or four Beyonds all at once to do a and b testing because I'm so so very picky on visuals and there was actually a version of the beyond that had a even wider fob than what is going to be sold at the mass market and one the one I'm using but I made some big complaints about it because it was sacrificing too much stereo overlap and some things started to look quite unnatural and when I was staring at text like a spatial Computing use case it was actually giving me eye strain apparently I was the only one to complain about that version because of the use cases I usually do in VR and they listened to me and chose the version I preferred which was the kind of middle grounds between the extreme fob and lowest overlap with something that does sacrifice stereo overlap compared to the first model to what we have now it makes me happy when a company does actually care enough to not actually boost their fov numbers or their specs numbers just to get that written on a marketing sheet and actually get something that might make everyone's experience more comfortable because it would suck if I had to get this final version of the hmd and I was getting eye screen with some of the things I was doing that would that'd be terrible now big screen is not perfect there's some things I want to talk about in this video related to actual Clarity of the h d so there's two things I like to do in VR as I was saying I like to put up a lot of digital screens in my environment and keep doing some of the stuff I would normally do on PC but in a VR experience so for the idea of spatial Computing or doing productivity for this hmd I was kind of touching on it a little bit but I've sent more time since then to see whether this was actually useful for that use case and I still think it does just finally touch the barrier where a VR headset could be sort of a monitor replacement if you don't mind some sort of glaring things and the biggest thing is glare the version of the beyond that I used in my first video talking about it was the fact there was a lot of glare involved on high contrast scenes I said it seemed like it was a pancake based Reflections but instead of actual Reflections it was muted to what seems like a slight glare or or sort of like a uh uh like like a haloing effect it was really bad for that first model I was able to get over it for more scenarios but ironically watching movies in the thing when you're usually in a dark and theater environment with a bright screen it was pretty annoying to do now it is still there though with this new updated Optics they did mute it further but if you're anything like annoyed by the index sort of God Rays or glare that comes from that optic system this kind of does feel like that especially as you get to the edges the display or just glare seems to gravitate on the edges which why I think it's more of a pancake reflection thing s Edge Clarity is of course not as clear as something like the quest Pro as you go further out the quality will jump off a cliff and as if you're not in the actual Center of your lenses which you should be with the custom 3D printed mask then yeah it's gonna look blurry and things aren't gonna look weird it's very important to actually have the correct ipd due to this one reason these lenses are very small so if you're just a little bit off millimeter wise there's a high possibility your Clarity experience will be very poor now if you were actually in the zone that the freaking device was designed for you to be in the actual Clarity and everything the way things look is fantastic it still has that OLED blacks and I got some specs from the manufacturer website that is around a 90 DCI P3 color gamut rating which is much higher than most LCD headsets on the market unless they have mini LED with qled uh color filter layer but when you compare the OLED high contrast with that those the the high color gamut rating that you just normally get from OLED it looks good most the time but there's one caveat that I kind of want to give a little bit of annoyance to the big screen team for because there's a issue that's kind of been overblown and I think it's been overblown mainly because there's just not been that much Clarity on why something is happening and being reported by reviewers including me I'm about to talk about right now so there's two modes that this headset can operate in and it does have a big aspect on the actual full clarity you're going to get out of it there's a 75 Hertz mode and a 90 Hertz mode this entire headset does run on Steam VR native drivers which means you don't need any other composer or any other tool to run at the same time as steamvr you just plug it in and play in fact even if you accidentally or for some reason pull out the tether while you're playing due to the fact that it is a native steamvr driver it is hot pluggable so you can plug it back in and continue playing for where you left off but big screen does have a third-party application that you'll use to change the actual refresh rate of the device and that's the only time you do actually have to restart steamvr and people have noticed that the 90 Hertz mode feels less sharp than the 75 Hertz mode which doesn't make sense because it's advertised as going to 2560 by 2560 resolution per eye at every mode but when you look in the steamvr uh super sampling settings you'll notice if you keep it both at 100 super sampling and you change the modes which require the restart the render resolution per eye changes uh completely and big screen hasn't been entirely clear of why that's happening and really what's happening when you change the refresh rate but do the fact that you know I do data mine steamvr I kind of know how these things work I can open up the lighthouse console and see what's happening basically every time you change the refresh rate with that third party tool you're actually writing a lighthouse config file into the hmd to tell it what to run at and whenever you switch it to the 90 Hertz mode you're actually running from your computer a 1920 by 1920 per eye image and with some confidential documents that have been linked around the supplier of the displays it seems that the back plane which is the display what it's made on does a 1.3 times upscaling to finalize the image to 2560 by 25 60 per eye in that mode it's basically impossible for the back plane to support 2560 by 2560 native even with DSC on at 90 Hertz so if you had a side-by-side image of a sort of a native resolution with a FSR upscale resolution it's basically the same thing as what's going on here but what's happening on the displays itself because the display is basically a chip it's a micro OLED display which is a silicon backplane so while you do notice a difference between 75 Hertz and 90 Hertz modes I feel the difference has been overblown not because of how different it is but because there just hasn't been Clarity on why it's happening however if you want to use this device as something like a spatial Computing device or doing 2D screens in your VR environment that is the biggest stress test where I think the 90 Hertz mode actually fails the most if you look at fine text on like a white background for example you get some of that aliasing that reminds me of when I actually were streaming my desktop to a quest Pro oh and you can see the encoding and then decoding adding a lot of sort of algorithmic compression issues that make the text look very similar to what you're seeing here despite this is looking this is actually tethered so if you do want to use this any 2D spine text stuff you're definitely going to use the 75 Hertz mode which is actually what I use most of the time and it does feel good because of all the other things I've been saying in this video but something that doesn't feel good as well is you are getting limited on brightness this headset does run less brightness than most LCD headsets I said that my first video I still stand by it if you're sensitive to low or I should say higher persistence than some of the other headsets like the for example the psvr2 I gave a lot of kind of complaints about it it's still like that here when you run at 100 percent I usually run it around 50 and remove some of that persistence blur because the way persistence work is when you move your head your eye usually counter rotates because you're staring at something and that your brain kind of perceives a blur from that because the light is on all the time time so this headset will not be as bright some other LCD hmds so if you really like bright uh daylight scenes that might be something that stops you from enjoying this hmd but if you like going to uh nightclub Raves and VR chat or doing a lot of sort of um like space simulator games this headset will look fantastic in my opinion I have two final points I would like to cover and one thing is the actual tracking quality a lot of people wonder with the such a small headset relying on the steambr lighthouse does it track well especially when you put this little thing that's covering a lot of the photo Dions on the actual device itself and I will say it tracks fantastic I never have any issues with occlusion or anything related to that with the actual current prototype um it tracks very well I'm already in the same VR Lighthouse ecosystem and if you are in the CVR Lighthouse ecosystem you won't notice any difference in terms of tracking quality with other headsets and I'm very confident to say that however if you're not in the lighthouse ecosystem there's something I want to warn you about um before you dive in and spend a thousand dollars plus to get into it it seems like the lighthouse 2.0 base stations are being transferred ownership and Manufacturing from valve who's been Manufacturing in their us Factory for the past four or five years is actually going to HTC and HTC has a history of increasing prices to get a little bit more money they're not going to take a loss on any hardware there might be also some implications of valve not wanting to fast-produce Lighthouse 2.0 base stations but I'm going to leave that up to you to speculate if you're already in the lighthouse ecosystem have all the controllers these things are not a problem for you this is more something that people are should be aware of if they're not and some other things people are also I'm noticing waiting on are things such as a headset similar to big screen Beyond with the same size and weight but also Standalone and all the other stuff that comes with that and I'm really confident to say you're not going to see that for a while the reason why this headset is so tiny and so compact compared to other things is because of the fact that they don't have to rely on putting batteries and Cooling and all these things into inside the device this can't happen with current technology at least for the next few years if you were to pack in all these chips and other stuff to do processing on board so basically this is still like an early adopters Enthusiast device for people who are big in the PC VR and in my opinion again in the lighthouse ecosystem already I think this device is actually in sort of a weird Market of its own where it can actually compete with some of the fully featured hmds that I have stuff like a vario xr3 I can use and do some insane stuff with I have the quest Pro I have the valve index I have all these I have tons of headsets here to use but despite the them having way more features I sometimes just still again daily drive this thing because it's just nice to put something on comfortable and just lay around and chat with people talk with people and play a game here and there if you're an active gamer or very active dancer or anything the actual material that this thing is being made with which is like a silicone rubbery type material it doesn't really sell any sweat at all and during the summer months in Florida that has been actually a problem for me because when I'm putting this thing on and I'm moving around a lot I'm being active and I'm sweating it will just feel mildly discomfortable uh discomforting because it's just you know you got all this sweat around your eyes now and things are just sliding around it's not the best feeling and I wish there was some interesting uh third-party accessories that might be made to alleviate some of that feelings if you live in a more cooler area and you don't do that much Super Active stuff I never had a problem when I was using this thing before it became summertime I never had a problem with that and and it's it's it's a it's a cool thing it feels interesting but yeah that's pretty much everything I had to really update you on the big screen beyond my experiences I know it gave a lot of caveat to why you might not want the hmd but if you're someone that you kind of identify with the kind of user I am for VR I really think you'll like it in fact I given probably 10 people demos of my Beyond whether or not it was not tailored for the ipd or anything and every single person has come out Blown Away with the actual experience and comfort and made them excited for the future even if the future headsets are more focused on feature packing than this light form factor has it's an interesting device and I will continue to use it as much as I can because it's just a fun device to use in fact I want to even make accessories for it I think it would be a really cool thing to see what this thing can be done to kind of exit this sort of singular purpose and try to add more features to it let's see how ugly we can make it how many featured packs we can make it while also not adding too much weight to it I think that would be a fun project for everyone in the DIY community if you buy this h d which you can see as I said I've been doing mad science already bye

Channel: SadlyItsBradley

Views: 51,924

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Id: Uql5vB3m6Mc

Length: 26min 23sec (1583 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2023