This incredibly tiny VR headset weighs a fraction of the Valve Index, uses high resolution micro OLED displays, and it ships with a face cushion that manufacturer Big Screen Ink creates specifically for you using a 3D scan of your face. And the craziest part is that it's not an enterprise product that costs $3,500 upfront plus an annual subscription like the Vario VR3. I mean, it's not cheap either, coming in at around the cost of a PS VR2 and a Valve Index combined. But on the other hand, it's also the reason that I am finally excited to talk about PC VR again. I have a lot of thoughts to share on this one, but the big screen beyond is a legitimately next gen VR headset, guys. So don't tell me you're not here for it. And don't tell me you're not here for our sponsor. The Ridge. Naughty or nice, Ridge wallets make a great gift this holiday season. Check out the link below and get up to 30% off through December 20th. The very first thing you'll notice pulling the beyond out of the box is how incredibly small and light it is. They advertise it as being one sixth the weight of the Valve Index. And while I think that's a little disingenuous given that the Index has excellent headphones on board while the big screen requires you to BYO. I think it ends up feeling true because of the difference in weight distribution. You see, most modern headsets stick so far out that they end up feeling less like a pair of goggles and more like a monitor that's bolted to the front of your face. This, this is something truly different. And when you're moving around quickly, you don't feel that wobble, which almost manifests as a delay while the headset tries to catch up to you. The next thing you'll notice is the strap. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen but between the clunky adjustments, the way that the back resize is always slipping for me and this rear cable clip that gets torqued by the weight of the tether cable, it is a real downer compared to the headset itself. The good news is that my impressions of the face cushion were the polar opposite. I have, plainly speaking, never used a piece of consumer electronics that felt this bespoke. As part of the purchase process, you borrow a friend's iPhone and you upload a scan that you take of your face. They then use that to 3D print a one of a kind silicone style cushion. Then they take that a step further and they mate that cushion with a set of goggles that perfectly matches your interpupillary distance or IPD. And then you can take it even a step further and equip it with prescription lenses so that you never have to worry about fitting glasses under your headset ever again. Or sharing your VR headset ever again. This forever alone design philosophy ends up being one of the beyond's biggest strengths. The cushion really is incredibly comfortable and manages literally zero light bleed and apparently eschewing adjustable IPD contributed to significant weight savings but it also ends up being one of the headset's greatest weaknesses in that for anyone with a family or even an SO, this expensive investment will at best be mildly uncomfortable for anyone but you who uses it. And that's even if you pony up for additional face cushions once those become available. Then again, if your layabout children wanted to have a big screen beyond, they should have thought about that before they didn't have jobs, am I right? Yeah, child labor. Let's talk about the experience for you, the alpha of the house. Having never seen a micro OLED display before, I was blown away immediately by multiple aspects of the beyond's image quality. Okay, first of all, of course, you get the incredible contrast of OLED with blacks going from kind of gray in my valve index to actually black. But what really got me here was the fineness of the image. I mean, 2560 by 2560 doesn't sound like that much more than a PSVR2 but when you do the math, it is over 50% more pixels. It looks way better. But my screen door effect, like for real guys, this is the first headset that I've used that makes even the high quality assets in a game like Half Life Alyx feel kind of cheap and low res. It's kind of like when TV transitioned over to HD and we all went, special effects, probably need to get a whole lot better, don't they? The panels aren't particularly bright. Big screen quoted me about 80 nits at their default 100% brightness, which is considerably less than the index and a little over half of the Vive Pro, both of which are decidedly last gen products at this point. But I gotta confess that until I asked big screen about HDR compatibility for watching movies and the grand cinema in VR, I had no idea that the beyond was so dim. In fact, you can increase the brightness to about 200 nits in their driver utility but with zero light coming into the headset plus the reduced motion clarity that comes with a brighter display in VR, I actually found that I preferred the dimmer experience. Also, the beyond's fan kicks into high gear to protect the internal components and to keep the user's face from getting too sweaty when you turn it up. Capturing that. Speaking of, time to get sweaty here and actually fire up some games. Because of the bandwidth limitations of DisplayPort 1.4, the beyond can run either at 75 hertz at its native resolution using DSC or display stream compression, or it can run at 90 hertz at 1920 by 1920 using DSC once again, but also using big screen's own lossier compression that gets upscaled back to native once it passes through the optical cable back to the headset. And this has been a significant source of controversy in the lead up to the launch of this product. But now that I have it in my hands, I gotta say guys, I really do think the whole thing's been kind of overblown. It is true. There is a difference in image clarity. And if I was planning to spend an extended amount of time using a virtual desktop or watching movies, I would go to the trouble of adjusting the refresh rate in the driver and rebooting SteamVR. But for games, I found that any difference was more than made up for by the beyond's drastically reduced motion blur and edge fringing compared to LCD type displays. Now big screen has their own workaround. They suggest manually setting render resolution to 3,600 by 3,600. So you're effectively using super sampling to overcome this, but they also recommend an RTX 4080 or greater for this technique. So bottom line, if a future headset comes along that supports DisplayPort 2.0 and we don't need these compression tricks, then I'm never gonna say no to a visual fidelity boost. But for now that doesn't exist. And this trade-off is one that I would happily make. Though even characterizing it as a trade-off feels a little unfair to the beyond. This is the kind of upgrade where every game you play feels new and exciting again. Like for kicks, I fired up Lucky's Tale, which as it turns out is available on Steam now. I found myself once again, marveling at the fun, beautiful environments and just taking joy in the sheer immersiveness of the experience. And I've already touched on Half-Life Alyx a little bit, but to expand on that, you're still just a disembodied pair of hands, but it felt less like being in the game and more like being Alyx. I found myself getting distracted, just looking at things and marveling at the artwork as though I was putting on prescription lenses for the first time in my life and I could finally truly see it. One valid complaint I've seen about the beyond though, is that it's non-porous silicone type cushion can lead to some pretty unpleasant experiences in workout games like Beat Saber and Dance Dash. For my part though, I found that the effect I'm gonna call swamp eyes was less noticeable when I was already kind of damp all over anyway, and more noticeable when I wasn't doing anything. For example, I was sitting on the couch watching in Canto in the giant theater environment in big screens Steam app. And as amazing as it looked with the 4K copy that I ripped from Blu-ray, by the way, the all streaming future, it's gonna kind of suck for experiences like this. After 20 minutes or so, I felt like I needed to air the headset out. Big screen apparently does have plans for a future cloth cushion, but personally I plan to stick with this one. Oh, did I mention yet that I'm sticking with the beyond? I am, but it actually wasn't as simple a decision as I've made it sound like so far. The thing is, as much as I talk about watching movies or playing Alyx or whatever, the only thing I regularly do in VR is play Beadsaber. And the difference between 90 Hertz and the 144 Hertz of the index is pretty significant at a high level of play. After some longer sessions, however, I feel that the reduced motion blur is worth it along with the better overall image quality. Another thing I do from time to time though is stream. And I gotta tell you guys, whatever Valve did with the onboard audio system on the index is the kind of science that is so advanced that it is indiscernible from magic because these near field speakers are perfect for listening to music and the built-in mics often get comments from viewers asking what the heck I'm using and why my voice sounds so good. Thankfully, the mic on the beyond seems to be made of the same kind of magic. And if their upcoming audio strap is any good, that should hopefully resolve both my issue with cable riding my headphones and my issue with strap comfort. However, there's one more thing that cannot be overcome with a future update and it's this kind of lens flare effect that blooms out of bright objects. As my understanding goes, this is a side effect of the extraordinarily thin and light pancake lens assembly that big screen is using. There are advantages, like the aforementioned lightness and thinness, but this blur flare is a major and distracting drawback, at least when you're noticing it. Here's the thing though. I remember buying my first high-end display. It was a P95F plus B CRT. It was 19 inches and ran at 1600 by 1200 of 85 Hertz glory. And I know what you guys are thinking, where are you going with this old man? But please stick with me, okay? My point is that monitor used a technology called aperture grill to achieve a sharper image. And one of the complaints about aperture grill displays was that you could actually see two fine wires running across the screen where the horizontal damping wires were welded to the vertical wires that make up the grill. They're pretty noticeable. And I was on the verge of returning mine until I fired up one of my favorite games and promptly forgot that they were there. Say I told you I was going somewhere with this. I wouldn't say that the blur flares are as forgettable as my damping wires. In darker games like Beat Saber or Half-Life Alyx, they stopped bothering me altogether. But that wasn't the case all the time. While playing Lucky's Tale, for example, which is a bright game that puts the user in a fixed position where they look around a lot, I was often distracted by the perceived lower contrast in these flare areas or flareas as I've taken to calling them. And I felt the same way using the big screen beyond as a virtual monitor. If I'm a man of culture and dark mode all my things, honestly, it's all good. But as soon as some bright notification or app pops up, it's like someone threw Vaseline in my eyes and then shone a flashlight at me. I do appreciate a lot of the transparency and product education that big screen does on their product page, especially with respect to the compression that they're doing on the image. But these blur flares are conspicuously absent from their literature and it's something that I think they should be meeting head on in order to ensure that would-be buyers understand why this design choice was made. Because now that I do, I'm okay with it. There's just so much to love here. For example, I really appreciate the fact that it's USB powered rather than requiring a wall plug. It makes it so much easier to pack it up and take it with you if you wanted to do that for whatever reason. And while their no-frills approach means no frills, you know, integrated processing for standalone operation like Quest, no. Gaze tracking like the PSVR2, no. But believe it or not, that's actually something I like about their design philosophy. They did what they set out to do, build a smaller, lighter, more immersive VR headset, a true upgrade for people like me who already wired up their living rooms with tracking-based stations and don't want the compromises of inside-out tracking. It did result in some questionable choices, like for example, the inability to pop out of VR and talk to someone. Where am I, where am I supposed to put this thing? And not to mention the inability to share your headset like I mentioned before. Your beyond is yours and yours alone. But then, come to think of it, that's probably fine given what I know you people are using this thing for, so. Why do you only have one wand? What do you think I'm doing with the other hand? Just don't use this segue for that to our sponsor. Corsair, are you looking to build a PC but don't know the difference between a 12-pin and a bowling pin? Or maybe you just wanna reduce clutter with one standardized cable connecting everything. Well, Corsair's IQ-Link ecosystem could be the answer, huh? Create a chain of devices using the same simple connector, all leading to a single IQ-Link system hub that can be magnetically attached to the PC frame. Each of the hub's two ports can handle up to seven connected devices, reducing cabling complexity. With a range of products in the ecosystem, such as fans, coolers, and power supplies, building a fully connected PC is a breeze. Oh, and of course you can customize the RGB lighting in all of your Corsair devices with their IQ software. You're a gamer, aren't you? Check out Corsair's IQ-Link smart ecosystem at the link, no pun intended, down below, okay. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out my review of the Valve Index. It's over four years old, but hey, so is the Index, and somehow it has remained relevant. Well, until now anyway.
