THE BEYOND. After 4000 hours.. GOODBYE VALVE INDEX.

out of all of the VR headsets I've used over the past few years the one I actually end up using 99 of the time has been the valve index but it's been four years now and I've been itching for an upgrade vr's come a long way since its original launch and I'm happy to say it's finally here this is officially the headset that is replacing my trusty valve Index this is the big screen Beyond [Music] whoa whoa hold up on paper this choice to switch from the index to this kind of makes absolutely no sense compared to the index the Beyond has a lower refresh rate smaller field of view dimmer screens and cost double the price to many this may actually feel like a real step back for VR hardware and I get it promise we'll talk about that but first I want you to take everything you know about VR headsets and just hold your reservations for a moment because this right here is a completely new class of VR device we've never seen anything like it before at least not one that actually shouldn't and this is exactly where technical information about VR headsets in particular really just don't capture the full story we can point at numbers and rank things by them but numbers can't quantify an experience and in my time with the Beyond I've had some of the absolute best experiences I've ever had in VR so whether you're actually looking to buy this thing or not if you're interested in the presence in future of VR especially VR form factors I'd urge you to come along this journey because I think we're seeing something really special unfold right here in front of us and I quite literally can't get enough of it so this is the newest iteration of the Beyond I've been watching this headset since it was pretty much 3D printed and held together by hot glue and things have changed quite a bit and while this is still not quite the final final version what I have here is pretty representative of what's going to be shipping later this year and as you can see it's gotten a lot prettier since the last video and previously my only experiences with the Beyond have been for an hour or two here or there but I've had this unit for the past month or so and I've been spending a pretty ungodly amount of time using it so before we get into the full Beyond experience here's some basic information on it I'll start by saying that there's no way to really understand the Beyond without acknowledging its main development philosophy basically big screen set out to build the smallest lightest and most comfortable VR headset possible for you and that's an important part there's no onboard processor no built-in battery No cameras just a VR headset that plugs into a PC using base stations for its tracking and really the Beyond is just much closer to a set of custom VR goggles than a typical VR headset as we've always thought of it every unit is custom made using an iPhone face scan for both a personalized face gasket that allows for your exact face shape and to set the headset's ipd at exactly your inner pupillary distance which on one side is awesome you'll never have to adjust or fiddle with or change your ipd again you just throw it on and the headset kind of melts onto your face on the other hand you just can't really share this headset with people around you and for some people that's probably a total deal breaker and I get that entirely but it's just a fundamental feature of this headset it's not for everyone but that's kind of the point this is a headset made for you not everyone and for all of its sharing drawbacks this development philosophy does have some inherent huge benefit in total the Beyond is about the same size and weight as a quest 2's controller which is crazy and we'll talk about the experience of these trade-offs in a bit but I want to get into the juicy technical details for just a moment on board are two 2560 by 2560 micro OLED displays a couple of tiny pancake lenses a fiber optic cable and extra USBC input and of course it's also got a stereo microphone which takes the cake as definitively the best microphone ever put on a VR headset today and a funny little thing here my mic setup for recording these videos costs about as much as the Beyond does and the Beyond gives it a run for its money you can hear me using it right now actually yeah it sounds pretty good there's no built-in headphones or speakers but I've just been using airpods Max or Pro something that I've kind of grown to really love surprisingly but there are a few huge things that we have to talk about and some of them are kind of negative but this also just kind of goes to show where we're at right now with technology and what kind of trade-offs you have to make to make something like this in warning this headset is gonna start sounding worse and worse but hang in there with me so these lenses do a pretty good job but they're not perfect especially with extremely high contrasting scenes like for example a completely black background with a white light in the middle yeah you're gonna experience some glare it's not any more distracting than something like the valve index is God Rays or Quest 2's God rays but because the lenses and displays are different than any other headset so is the type of glare it's something you'll notice right away but after using it for 30 minutes or so my brain kinda cancels it out the same way it does with other VR headsets I'm just making sure you know that it's there I also found that with these lenses keeping them smudge free is way more important than others but the next thing there's a pretty harsh tactical limitation here refresh rate wise because of these displays the Beyond is only capable of a Max 90 Hertz refresh rate and technically if you want the full native 2560 by 2560 you you'll have to go all the way down to 75 Hertz otherwise the Beyond upscales a 1920 by 1920 resolution image and that sounds awful but that's not the whole story I was a little confused about the specifics of the upscaling of 90 Hertz so I just asked big screen themselves about the details and turns out this upscaling compression is really just the same thing that the index uses when you flick on 144 Hertz also the vibe Pro 2 uses the same upscaling technique as well just kind of nobody talks about it and its specifics DSC is just encoding signals that don't fit over certain portions of the electronics so that they can fit at a higher refresh rate and then when it gets to the displays we decompress it to the full native resolution of the panel but we're able to losslessly compress things down and it's visually lossless so 90 Hertz is 90 Hertz and you are getting 99 of the image quality you would be getting at 75 Hertz but there's also another thing here the big reason refresh rate is thrown around a lot in the world of VR headsets is because it's a pretty good metric of motion Clarity which is incredibly important for VR except it's hard to compare LCD panels like on the index to the micro oleds like on the Beyond because for example the pixel response time on the Beyond is literally a thousandth of the indexes so 90 Hertz for a micro OLED isn't the same perceived value or look as 90 Hertz on an LCD panel it's a little complex and of course I still would have loved 120 hertz but what I'm trying to say here is that as a 144hz index user I didn't mind the 90 Hertz and I seriously don't think it's nearly as big of a drawback as it seems on paper but now of course the other elephant in the room field of view so here are my recorded field of view numbers for the index Quest 2 and the Beyond this is all subjective everyone's gonna be slightly different here but you can see my fov is about the exact same as the Quest 2 and it's about 15 degrees less horizontally and vertically than the index and again all of these things may feel like a step back lower field of view a half the refresh rate come on but here's where technical on paper specifications just don't capture the most important part of a virtual reality experience the actual experience because the second you throw on a Beyond you can tell immediately this is something completely new so you've heard the technicals this is the Beyond experience the first time you put on this headset it feels way more like putting on a pair of reality portal goggles because of the face gasket that literally conforms exactly to your face zero light comes in from your surroundings and it's kind of a weird feeling it's almost like visual sensory reality deprivation and I think you'll get what I mean but you just don't have that subliminal reality Lifeline of peeking through the nose hole or that slight little pinprick of light that you use to see through like you have on every other VR headset all you can see here is the virtual and on top of that the Beyond is crazy light and it fits like a glove I mean that's the whole point of it being custom made it's a big part of the experience no longer is VR a giant half pound toaster floating in front of your face but the real magic here are the displays micro oleds are just incredible for VR and these ones are tuned really well near vario Arrow Clarity with 28 pixels per degree no Mira like on psvr2 in perceivable screen door effect vibrant colors and super high contrast ratios it's beautiful and while these displays are probably dimmer and the fov is probably lower than what you're used to because there's absolutely no light leak there's no sensory or light reference for your eyes to compare the brightness to it's like imagine grabbing your phone in the middle of the night the brightness is at 30 or whatever which is dim outside in the day but it's blinding and makes you wins at 3am and it's because your eyes have adapted to a dark room and well when you're on VR visual sensory deprivation Island and the Beyond's displays can literally go all the way black since they're micro oleds when you're in a dark and environment for a few minutes your eyes will have adjusted so when something bright does come up your eyes will react to it physically it's all relative right now with LCD panels we're just blasted with light all the time and light leak makes that even worse this however is just an entirely different perceptual experience and in the last video my eyes had adjusted to the completely dark environment so the moon seemed really bright and this time I was playing Half-Life Alex and it felt like I was playing a completely different game the mood and tone and how my body was reacting to it was just off the walls plus the resolution and Clarity just makes everything look way better than it did before I can see detail where there was aliasing or individual pixels before and this is my Beyond experience VR feels fresh again and I'm spending more time in it than I have in years and on top of that it's way more comfortable and I'm far more immersed like I'm literally getting lost in virtual reality again like it's my first time and let me just tell you something really cool but also a little terrifying my first day with the Beyond at home I threw on the headset and somehow 10 hours flew by and when I took off the headset it was dark outside I think the last time that happened was when I first got VR years ago and played loneko on the cv1 and I've been chasing that feeling ever since but here you go I'll say it right now I hope that all headsets can reach this level of immersion but if they do it's also a little scary but I guess I have really enjoyed my little peek into the potential future of VR so at this point it may sound like I kinda like this headset and yeah obviously and I will stick by that I'm not getting any Kickback this is only a loner unit I'm not getting anything for saying this but right now it is the headset that I'm using more than anything else in fact I haven't been using any other headset and I've been using VR more and to me that's a pretty darn good piece of Hardware however do not get me wrong here I am not saying you should go out and rip out a kidney and go buy this this thing look take it from experience I've sold enough kidneys for this whole VR thing and uh well I'm running out of them and my wallet hurts and I also know for a fact that again this headset is not for everyone and I'm also truly not sure if I'm gonna use this as long as I use my index for in fact I kind of doubt I'm gonna get four years out of this but along that same vein I really urge you to not think of this as the index too because the index as it is is still ten thousand percent relevant the Beyond doesn't make your index or Quest 2 any worse or obsolete it just makes the experiences that you can have in VR today a little bit better instead I want you to think of this as something like an index micro remember those Game Boy minis or PSP micros whatever kind of like that it does everything that the index already does something's a lot better and some things not quite as good because of the form factor and it doesn't necessarily add any new features but it does do exactly what big screen was trying to do they made the best pcvr headset they possibly can and of course it is expandable I added face tracking onto this thing it did perfectly fine and you could add all sorts of other stuff I'm pretty sure nofio is working on a wireless adapter for it but you could just do the exact same thing to the index it doesn't really add anything other than the experience and the immersion the index is not dead but that being said the index has gotten stale for me I've used it for four years now that's an eternity in the world of tech so here's who I would absolutely recommend this to if you're currently an index user or Vive user meaning you're already on steamvr and you have a grand laying around and some of these trade-offs don't bother you I almost guarantee that you'll see exactly what I'm talking about and you'll have a very similar Beyond experience as me if you're not on steamvr already though this is a way harder sell a grand plus base stations plus controllers uh I don't know that's a lot of money and I don't know if I could really recommend that with a clear conscious and if you're someone that will not compromise on field of view I other headsets exist and all of these ideas can co-exist that's the cool part about virtual reality Hardware right now we're figuring things out and trying new things and it's awesome all I'm saying is I've had a really great time with Beyond and it's the device out of all the ones that I've tried and that I own that actually gets me to use VR consistently and for that reason right now it's my favorite VR headset and also it's pretty exciting to know that big screen isn't done this is literally just V1 and I'm excited to see how far custom-made super tiny VR headsets can go in the future but I will say next time moving forward from this point I think starting next year I'm not sure if I will be buying any VR headset that doesn't have face and eye tracking built in I'm giving it a pass this time because I think I can mod it in later I've already got face tracking working but still Beyond two I'll put in my wish list now wider field of view face tracking eye tracking let's just crank those numbers up but yeah what do you guys think let me know other than that thank you so much everybody for watching this means the world to me and if I missed anything here I'll be doing a Beyond AMA on Twitch right after this or you could just comment down below but yeah again thank you and of course much love everybody relax [Music] foreign

Channel: ThrillSeeker

Views: 667,444

Keywords: vr, virtual reality, quest 2, index, valve index, oculus, meta quest, meta quest 2, Thrillseeker, BEST VR HEADSET, Best Vr headsets, Best Vr headsets 2023, Big Screen, Bigscreen Beyond, VRChat, Tuesday Newsday

Id: URgl_Ah4Zzk

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023