My Varjo Aero VR Headset...A $2K MISTAKE?

welcome well i did it i dropped two grand on a new headset for vr flying i just got the headset yesterday and in this video i'm going to give you my initial impressions and answer the question was it worth it i'll also show you some through the lens video to look at and evaluate and i'll also give you the pros and cons as i see them at this early point before we get started i'd like to caution you about three things pay more attention to what i say than what you see on the screen because there's no way a screen can tell you or explain to you what vr flying is about you need to try it to understand it the vr experience is at least an order of magnitude more realistic than anything you can see on a screen another thing you'll see when you look at vr videos on a 2d screen it's a lot of rapid head movements those aren't noticeable when you're in vr your eyes have an uncanny ability to stay focused on an object when your head's moving the headset unfortunately moves with your head so it often looks like the heads are moving back and it's kind of jumbled and hard to look at but it's not that way at all in vr it's very natural finally any through the lens iphone footage that i put in this video is not going to do the reality of what you see in the headset justice it's just almost impossible to keep that iphone in the right position to stay focused you'll see it go through glimpses of sharpness so the sharpest you see is probably about what it looks like everywhere in the headset unfortunately you just can't keep the iphone centered in the right place long enough so why would i even consider dropping two thousand dollars on a vr headset the vario arrow well let me give you a little background by showing a short video that convinced me vario is on to something now vario which is located in finland offers a professional headset called the xr3 about six thousand dollars plus fifteen hundred dollars a year to offer true mixed reality what they do is they have a headset with pass-through video and they can create a mask to allow a physical cockpit to interact with the virtual world here using p3d looks pretty bad compared to the new microsoft flight simulator but you can see the possibilities this video is so clear that you can see an iphone you can read documents you can see your cockpit for switches but outside you have the virtual world a great way to train and i think the future of simulation now this requires a headset with very high resolution and that's what the arrow has it has the same video screens as this unit it just doesn't have the pass-through video but it's 35 pixels per degree which is human eye resolution maybe even better than human eye resolution for some of us old guys now i really think this is the future for flight simulation training especially at home no longer a need for an array of big screen tvs or curved screen projection system this just makes sense and even if your home cockpit doesn't include hardware there's no reason this system couldn't still work look what flight safety's been doing by masking off a crt display for the instruments in the flight controls the pass-through video can be composited with the simulator to get the same effect but without all the hardware i think using a touch screen in a program like air manager would make the cockpit very interactive and do it at a much lower cost than a full hardware setup i'm just convinced that mixed reality is the future of flight simulation and that a high resolution headset is going to be critical so let's talk about the vario arrow there's lots of deep dives into the headset out there the one that comes to mind probably the best the vr flight sim guy i'll put a link in the description below but i do want to share my impressions of this headset especially as someone who's actually paid for it with his own hard-earned money so let me show you some examples i'll start off with a microsoft flight simulator the uh the default bonanza and let's take a look some at some of the mirror now the mirror is a representation of what you see in the headset and i'm just going to show you the raw mirror here uh of course it's just showing the left eye but you can see uh the quality of the rendering it's obviously the resolution is slightly higher than what you see in the headset but you can see the field of view horizontally and vertically it's about 115 degrees wide and the actual resolution of the headset is about 2880 by 2720 so it's a very high pixel count on each eye interestingly the the same settings that i could run with my previous reverb g2 runs this higher density display with similar graphics settings and similar frame rates and remarkably smooth performance now vario has their own software called vario bass which is the equivalent of windows mixed reality or steamvr to run these programs from it uses openxr or openvr i find openxr working with microsoft flight simulator is a great combination now the resolution is so high that we can zoom in and crop this image to full screen and we still have an hd image very high quality video with no loss of clarity another feature the arrow has is a foveated rendering the headset tracks your eyes at a rate of 100 samples per second and follows your eyes and it enables a foveation area which i'll show here to move with your eye movements and although it's not supported on any of the simulators yet it will eventually and it allows a higher resolution to be displayed in the area where the eye is looking because the actual part of your eye that has high resolution the fovea is very small so areas you're not looking at could be rendered at a lesser uh resolution saving uh computing power and you wouldn't be able to tell because you can only see in a very narrow cone with your sharpest vision now there's a utility that allows you to see the foveation area and i just thought i'd show you i thought it's kind of cool be able to see as i look at different areas of the of the scene you can see the yellow area showing the area that would be rendered higher of course this is not supported on any of the flight simulators yet but hopefully someday in the future i was surprised to learn that the the central uh fovea the the high resolution part of your vision where you have 20 20 vision is actually only two degree one to two degrees which is about as you see here the width of your thumb when your arm is held out next time you're reading just uh look at one word and see see that you can't really see the and read the words around that now uh the arrow has a spherical lenses as opposed to the fresnel lenses that most of the other headsets have and it gives a wider feel the field of view is 115 degrees but boy it seems wider and the sweet spot is enormous uh compared to the even the reverb g2 which i loved using so now i'm going to give you a peek through the lens uh and on the ground here obviously i can't fly the airplane and hold my iphone in the headset but i'd like to give you a peek and let you see kind of what you see although as i said earlier it's not near as clear as what you see in the headset it's very hard to try to keep this in focus and to hold the phone in a position that keeps it square but you'll get glimpses here of of times where it'll be perfectly in focus and you'll see how sharp the the writing is the labeling on all the instruments when it's in focus it it will show you that it's really quite impressive there's absolutely no screen door effect and it just looks so lifelike that it's really amazing not only is the image sharper but the 3d effect having a stereo vision in 3d is what really makes it realistic and if you haven't tried it you just can't fathom how realistic it looks like you can reach out and touch things uh they're so real looking so anyway this is uh just a little sample of of what it looks like um and i'm had to of course had to do it in the vertical orientation to get the iphone into uh the headset it really is quite stunning and the sweet spot as i said is quite big so it's a little bit easier to hold the iphone and get a good shot it really is quite stunning and i know i had an opportunity to fly an approach in the 787 in microsoft flight simulator and it was so realistic sitting in that beautiful new cockpit it kind of made me regret that i had to retire when i did before i had a chance to fly such an awesome aircraft and this is just very easy to install the vario based software was easy to set up i was up and running in about 15 minutes when i got the software and got started now let's take a look at the baron in x-plane to get the vario base hardware to interface with x-plane 11 i had to use open vr and it worked fine as you can see this is again a shot from the mirror that's been cropped and you can see the resolution is just great um one thing i didn't mention is that this is an outside in tracking so i like the inside out and i i was a little bit frustrated that i had to go spend 200 extra to buy a steamvr base unit it was easy to set up you just plug it in and put it up in front i used one unit you're going to be seated you really don't need more than one but i did notice if i turned around to look towards the back of like towards the rear of the aircraft that it did lose tracking so two would probably be a good idea especially for aerobatics or air combat so here are some views from x-plane the baron the stock baron with x-plane using uh openvr and the vario base software the headset is adjustable and quite comfortable to wear one annoyance is that they didn't include any controllers so you have to buy some steam vr compatible controllers which can run in quite a bit of money too obviously i was able to fly without them but it would be nice to have them included now let's take a look at the cessna on microsoft flight simulator again all these pictures were taken with the mirror and cropped using the recording software that's built into the vario base software i have to admit i'm getting a little better and not moving my head so rapidly but it takes a lot of conscious effort because it's just not normal to hold your head and look around with your eyes does make for better vr videos so now let's take a look at some final uh through the lens footage of the cessna from microsoft flight simulator unfortunately a iphone video is never going to give you uh the true feel for what it's like in vr but i think you can see it's pretty good quality uh you know it's kind of like a high definition television if you've never seen it initially it looked fantastic but you get used to it and i think the vr headsets are the same way i went from the the riff to the rift s to the g2 reverb and now on to this supposedly best but uh soon probably to be the standard so i'm in the honeymoon phase but i gotta tell you that uh this is by far the best headset that i've ever worn the resolution is spectacular so i think this definitely is the best consumer headset you can buy but it's certainly at a price but is it worth it stand by in a moment i'm going to give you a summary of my pros and cons and whether i think my money was well spent so let's take a look at some of the pros first first of all the performance of this headset is fantastic the visual resolution is unsurpassed it has a great sweet spot i love the aspheric lenses compared to the fresnel lenses the field of view uh seems wider than it's advertised but it's very nice maybe because of the you know the wider sweet spot it seems wider i don't know uh it's it's also future proofed i think with the foveal rendering i think that's going to be something in the future and the fact that that's already included also that eye tracking that does the foveal rendering also does an automatic ipd adjustment so that's not a big deal but if you're passing it between different people it saves a little time physically the unit is quite comfortable to wear it has a lot of good adjustments i love the head mounting system and it's lightweight so uh in that regard it's a nice nice setup the performance was quite smooth i know that it does use the cpu a little more than windows mixed reality units that are out there i noticed the gpu wasn't straining quite as hard and the performance was nice very few stutters and i'm just learning how to use it the base software the vario based software worked very well and it was easy to set up i set it up in about 15 minutes and i was up and running now for some of the cons well first of all this thing came without any controllers i found that annoying it came without any audio headset it comes with just a jack that's unusual i think for something this high priced next big one is that it requires the outside in tracking which means you have to invest in at least a two hundred dollar base unit if you want two units you got four hundred dollars more when you add that to the controllers that uh probably three hundred dollars you're talking about quite a big investment in addition to the headset for the price some people buy headsets you're just going to pay that to uh to just bring this up to a fully uh equipped unit but the elephant in the room is a cost and that's definitely a con i mean two thousand dollars plus for a headset is really outside what i consider consumer i happen to have had a little money from my knobster royalties so i went on and invested some of that back into this hobby but have i had i not had that i might have hesitated to spend this kind of money for a headset don't get me wrong i'm blessed to have it and i'm going to enjoy using it and i'm going to try to keep you informed as i learn more about it but uh i think the sweet spot for a headset ought to be probably about 500 i can't see a consumer headset going much more than a thousand or so maybe 1200 so i think i think as time goes on this technology is going to become more and more available to people who are are just normal users by bringing that price down and i think the technology we see here is going to become the standard technology and i'm sure the visual resolution is just going to continue to improve vario does a lot of things with hand tracking and as you saw in my previous video mixed reality i'd love to see them add a add-on unit that you could snap on the front of here or someone else to make a third-party camera input that could be used to create true mixed reality which i really am looking forward to if you like this video please like subscribe share with your friends and i'd love to have your comments i really do enjoy this hobby and i love sharing it with you guys and i do appreciate a little feedback from time to time oh and yes i don't think i made a mistake buying this headset thanks for watching hope to see you on my next video you

Channel: Russ Barlow

Views: 81,670

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Id: NzuSusLPn8Y

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022