VR GAME CHANGER? - Varjo Aero from a Sim Racer's Perspective

hey guys will here so today we are taking a much anticipated look at the vayo aero vr headset now this is going to be a first look style video not a full review this is a prototype unit that they've sent across we'll explain some of the details around that in just a moment but today we're going to be taking a look at this unit from the perspective of the sim racer seeing whether this is a major leap forward in terms of vr technology for sim racing and yeah give you our impressions and i guess set some expectations around this product from what we expect to see once this goes full release so let's get going so there's been a huge amount of hype around this headset over the last couple of months this is a company which is known for sort of medical and industrial grade vr technology which is extremely expensive and not really suited to the consumer market there are expensive annual subscription fees that you needed to pay to enable features and things like that so what we can think of this as being is basically an adaptation of the key elements of the technology which is intended for medical and industrial use brought across into a more accessible consumer type product so we don't have things like subscription fees to pay to run one of these although the barrier to entry is still admittedly quite high at 1990 us dollars or euros so it's not a cheap headset by any means so obviously our expectations for the quality that we're going to be getting out of this are very high based on the price point but that said it is a lot cheaper than you know a medical or industrial grade headset would be and this kind of flow down effect is obviously really great for consumers because it means that we're seeing that technology become cheaper and cheaper the barrier to entry becoming lower and lower now as mentioned at the top of the video this is a prototype unit we don't know exactly what is going to change between what we have in our hands here today and what you guys will be getting your hands on if you order one of these so what we're going to do today is just run through this headset in top level detail and give you a basic understanding of what the experience is like as it stands right now we'll then of course revisit with a full review once we know exactly what the final production units are going to be like get our hands on one and are able to do more extensive testing now there are a lot of really interesting features both from a hardware and software perspective on this headset so let's start off by taking a run through the hardware here so the first thing that i noticed as soon as i took this out of the box it is very very light particularly compared to the pimax 8k x which i was using just a couple of days ago so this weighs in and it's got a little cheat sheet here in front of me so i don't get any of these details wrong grams for the headset itself plus 230 grams including the counterweighted headband so we do have some counterweighting going on here to make sure this sits correctly on your head and that is extremely important as we'll see a little bit later on in the video the unit does use outside in tracking so we will need some light houses that uses steamvr 2.0 or 1.0 lighthouses so that is an additional cost that you'll be putting on top of the cost of the headset and if you want hand controllers those are going to cost you extra as well so in terms of the external appearance here a couple of things that do stand out i really like the fact that it has this plate on the top here which is going to sit and balance it on top of your head as well one of the complaints that i had with the pimax 8kx was that there was a lot of weight on the bridge of my nose and obviously that's going to depend on your your anatomy but having the weights sort of primarily resting on the top of your head and supported by the back of your head should theoretically make the headset feel quite a lot lighter on your face so we'll comment on that once you get up and running in just a moment but i do really like that i also like the fact that it uses this kind of plethora material here as well which is relatively non-porous compared to something like a cloth that means that you can easily wipe this down with an antibacterial wipe or something like that obviously important at the moment with the pandemic situation if you're using this in a you know public sort of setting but also just so it doesn't get stinky and gross over time fabric you know absorbs dead skin cells and sweat and things like that and can just get gross over time whereas with this you can give it a quick white clean and it's nice and fresh and ready to go again so we can see it does have this kind of cloth material around the outside here and then we can see these little cooling vents here as well now one of the really interesting things about this headset is it does have active ventilation so there's a little cooling fan in there that actually passes air through and around your face as you're wearing the headset so we'll comment on how that works once we're up and running as well the front faceplate is a reflective material obviously to allow infrared light to pass through i would presume on the left hand side here you can see a little headphone jack now the documentation on their website does state that the retail versions of these headsets will come with some sort of headphones and microphone system which you can plug in the prototype version that we have here didn't come with that so i can't comment on that at all at this point in time but we do have the 3.5 mil jack there which you can jack in and obviously use this device as an audio interface or of course you can just use the audio coming out of your pc via another audio interface device so that is all good on the right hand side here we have a couple of buttons as well which we'll take a look at in the software interface in just a moment a little indicator light there too and that is pretty much everything in terms of the external device little knobs here for adjustment on your head they feel like they're metal and they have a really nice feeling to their nice and smooth as you turn them just everywhere that you look on this thing it just feels very expensive and very premium which obviously we would expect for the price point so having a look on the inside of the headset now you can see the aspherical lenses that they're using here so we're not using fresnel lenses for this and there's a couple of good reasons for that which we'll explore once we get into the full review a little bit later on down the track but you don't see those little lines on the lenses like you get with fresnel lenses obviously you don't see those when you're wearing the headset anyway but that is an obvious difference there behind those lenses of course we have two mini lcd led panels with a resolution of 2880 by 2720 pixels per eye just reading off my cheat sheet here again now brightness calibrated to 150 nit colors calibrated with a coverage of 99 srgb as well and a native refresh rate of 90 hertz per panel so one of the really interesting things about this is it also does have integrated eye tracking there's a couple of really useful uses for that one of those is for automatic ipd adjustment and if we unplug the usb connection here just quickly and then plug that back in you'll actually see there we go plug it in sounds quite cool as well you can see those little lenses moving left and right so what happens is when you put the headset on and you'll see this in the software in just a moment it picks up the position of your pupils and adjusts the lenses to suit your your spacing between your pupils or ipd which is really really cool the other really great use for eye tracking is of course things like vrss but we'll explore that in just a moment too so the supported ipd range is 57 to 73 millimeters and we have a horizontal field of view of 115 degrees as well so one degree more than we have with the hp reverb g2 and when i put the headset on it does look pretty much exactly the same so i think that's pretty much everything we need to cover just at the top level in terms of hardware a nice flexible chord as well as one other thing that i did notice it does have a single usbc connection which you can plug directly into a 20 series graphics card the ones that had the usbc connection on them if you have a 30 series those of course don't have that usbc connection so you will need to use the included interface box which has a displayport connection as well as a usb connection and a power supply one other thing i did notice is that the cable is relatively thin and nice and flexible as well so you don't feel too heavily tethered when you're wearing the headset so let's pop this up on my head now and the first thing you're going to get presented with here is a calibration so it says move your head it kind of tells you where it needs to be positioned on your face so i'm going to get that positioned correctly tighten up the back and as i said before that adjustment does feel very natural on the back of your head it clamps on quite nicely now it's saying out calibration unsuccessful that's because i was still moving things around on my head there so one of the things that i would suggest and this may be something that we see in the final version of the software is the ability to allow you to adjust things around before it actually tried to do the calibration would probably be sensible just so you don't run into that issue but let's just quickly run through and recalibrate again there we go so eye tracking calibration press any button on the headset to continue look at the dot so i'm staring at the dot moving it down and there we go so we should be nicely calibrated now headset's sitting very comfortably on my head and one of the things i noticed straight away is just how light and comfortable this does feel i can feel that slight air movement coming through past my eyes it does feel a little bit uh disconcerting just having that air movement it's no different from you know being outdoors with airflow or being in an air-conditioned room or something like that but just having it so close to my face like that does feel a little bit strange it certainly doesn't feel like it's you know putting any pressure on my eyes or anything like that it's not like one of those pressure tests that you have done at the optometrist or anything like that but definitely am aware of the presence of that air movement so it'll be really interesting to see how that influences when we go for longer driving sessions but just looking around on the virtual desktop here i'm just going to bring up the overlay quickly by pressing the side button the menu button we can see we get this little overlay here so we can go reposition your virtual desktop so we'll go click and there we go now our virtual desktop is right in the middle we can align ourselves and then click another button and that is going to align it perfectly for us so having a look around on the little screen here i'm just going to minimize obs here as well so we're not all looking at the same thing twice so inside the software interface here this is basically what i'm seeing over here and then obviously this is the eyeball tracking going on too now one of the really interesting things that we can do here is if we click on gaze dot that little dot there is actually tracking where my eyes are looking on the screen so as i look around you can see that is moving which is really cool i can see quite a few potential usage cases where we could actually use that to track where our eyes are looking as we drive around a track on a race track so this could be really interesting and really useful for creating some training materials and things like that so that's definitely something that i'm very excited to explore a little bit further on down the track now one thing i do notice straight away and i've watched a couple of other reviews of these headsets which mentioned a couple of limitations around barrel distortion as well as chromatic aberration now barrel distortion is the effect of sort of this the screen warping towards you almost like you're looking at a sphere rather than a flat two-dimensional surface now when i'm looking at a relatively two-dimensional static image we do get a little bit of that barrel distortion effect going on so if i move the headset up and down i can see the image kind of warping up and down which kind of indicates that that is going on but if the headset is fixed in a clean and tidy position right in the middle it's not where it's not moving around it's clamped onto my face nice and solidly you know if i'm moving my head around and bouncing my head around i'm not seeing that distortion effect taking place and it's not really something that i'm noticing just looking around like this what i do notice is quite heavy distortion around the outer extremities of the of the field of view so that last sort of five degrees or so there is quite a lot of warping going on and a good example of this is if i look up at the top of the building here you can see that sort of a-frame structure which i'm looking at what i'm actually seeing there is if i move my eyes down just so that is just at the top of my field of view there that actually warps away so i actually don't see the point at all what i see is it kind of just sweeps away into the distance and it bends out completely so within the sweet spot of the field of view the picture is incredibly clear and i'm not i i can barely make out the individual pixels at all i think the uh the dots per square inch or the ppi is actually finer than it is with the pi max 8kx simply because the field of view is less so even though the panel resolution is lower on this headset than it is with the 8k x because the panels themselves are physically smaller the ppi or pixels per inch is less than it is with the pimax so that results in a crisper clearer image with even less screen door effect than we had with the 8k x which you know was barely any screen i mean i i described it as not really being a screen door effect at that point because it's not something that draws you away from the experience it's just that you are you are aware that you can see the individual pixels whereas with this i really do have to focus my attention 100 to see pixels at all and just looking around and you know navigating around generally it's incredibly clear so before we talk about image quality and those things too much let's just have a little bit of a look around in the software here now one of the things i do really like is that i can actually do this while i'm wearing the headset here so it's kind of all happening live because we have this virtual desktop interface it actually makes this really easy so we can see here we've got buttons for calibrating our eye tracking our action button our menu button we've got a button here for headset view and eye camera as well so if we click on eye camera that switches that off and we've got just the headset view we switch the eye camera back on we can see that as well that's actually quite freaky seeing my eyes responding like that it's amazing how quickly your eyes do twitch when they change positions like that it's not something that you get to see very often but it's really cool when you do so under the headset tab we've got an adjustment here for interpupillary distance and that is as i mentioned before automatic if we switch that off we can manually adjust that too but switching it back on you can see there it's going to trigger the automatic adjustment again and that is really cool how that happens because it you know basically what it's doing is essentially making sure that what you're seeing is the best quality image possible provided that you do have this mounted on your head correctly and we'll talk about the importance of that again a little bit later on once we get into looking around in google earth so underneath that we have an adjustment for our image quality resolution quality you can see faviated 39 ppd now foveated basically means that it's adjusting the resolution to make sure that you're seeing the highest resolution possible right within the sweet spot of your vision or where you're actually focusing your gaze and then as you move around the areas that are outside of your gaze are reduced in resolution and i assume that that is the reason why we actually see a lower resolution reported here than what we have as the native panel resolution even though we have it set to our maximum or our highest adjustment here of 39 ppd so that is definitely something that i'll clarify before we get into the full review there because that is a little bit confusing the fact that we don't have an adjustment here where we can just set it to native panel resolution so that is one of the ways that the eyeball tracking is integrated into the software so wherever you're gazing or wherever that attention is focused the flaviated resolution will adjust depending on where you're looking so that obviously does depend on game integration unfortunately none of the sim titles at this point in time at least when we're making the video do have vrss enabled vrss or vrss 2.0 i should say takes uh makes usage of eyeball tracking within vr headsets or hmds within a game environment so we can't actually demonstrate that for you today but again hopefully a little bit further on down the track that's something that we'll be able to check out as well we've got adjustments here for vsync as well as motion prediction now one thing i have noticed here particularly compared to the pi max 8k x which we tested just recently the general motion does seem to be quite smooth so there's obviously some sort of filtering or interpolation that's going on here little fine movements don't seem to be quite so jerky as they were with that particular headset now obviously that will depend on how you have your lighthouses set up around the room and things like that as well so obviously the experience is going to vary there depending on how things are set up and again that's something that we'll explore in our full review now we've got a tab here for presentation we've got a couple of different background scenes which you can choose from we've got a cabin which obviously you can see here in the background behind my virtual desktop we've got a grid pattern as well which is similar to the steam vr that i'm sure a lot of you will be used to but we're going to change it back to cabin for now disable headset buttons if you wish to do so disable notifications in headset eye tracking instructions and also a button here for optimizing performance which allows us to shut down the system processes that are not required by your application so that might actually be a sensible thing to switch on just for now and we can click across to workspace enable virtual desktop so if we switch that off you can see now that has disappeared we're going to click it back on again for now application background we can enable our hand controllers within the virtual space as well i don't actually have any hand controllers on here because again we are testing this in the context of sim racing virtual desktop shortcut button a configuration tool for setting up the parameters around our virtual desktop and we can run through the initial setup process here as well so should we wish to start over so then under system we can trigger steam vr room setup pair additional vr devices override origin and detection enable compatibility for openvr and openxr and a couple of other general settings here as well interestingly you can actually switch off eye tracking it says that faviated rendering will still remain active but the tracking data isn't available to any external applications now i don't really see why anybody would be precious about not having their eyeballs tracked because i don't really want how are you going to use that information but the options there should you wish to switch it off so then under support we've got the current software versions automatically check for updates we can flash firmware and do all those sorts of things there's a manual update button here as well if you wish to flash specific firmware and then we've got our basic troubleshooting options down here as well so again we'll explore this once we get into final production and we know that this is exactly what you guys are going to be getting your hands on as well but look overall a very very clean interface i really like how this is presented i love the virtual desktop system as well and you know having now sat here for a good few minutes running through this it is very comfortable to look at i'm already adjusting to the need to kind of turn my head around rather than using my eyeballs to look around the screen i don't think for me this is something that i would use in place of a monitor i don't think that i would want to use vr for doing things like photoshop and you know video editing things like that web browsing but the fact that i can navigate around my desktop and do all the things that i need to do quickly without having to take the headset off constantly is definitely a very big positive there now you can do virtual desktop inside steamvr as well of course but i do like the native presentation that we have here we can see as well headsets connected our two lighthouses are detected and then we also have the ability here to record and take screenshots natively within the application as well which is quite cool so i'm going to pop this off again just for a moment now oh there's the real world it is actually it's really really comfortable to wear that's something that is really impressing me i've had this on my head for a good 10 15 minutes now i'm not feeling any pressure on my nose at all very very comfortable and that airflow through the display as well does seem to take away some of that claustrophobia that i sometimes do get from wearing vr headsets as well so i'd say you know at least for a first impression that has really you know that's really really nailed that aspect as well but we'll talk about that a little bit more when we get up and do some driving soon but what i'm going to do now is open up one of the demo applications which they included with the reviewers package we'll take a look around in there then we'll have a look in google earth and we'll get up and do some sim driving so what we have here is a demo set inside an art studio which has a lot of three-dimensional detail and it's really cool just sort of having the headset on and feeling like you're really inside this environment with all the stereoscopic 3d stuff going on around you now in an environment like this the thing that you do notice straight away is that you do have a far more restricted field of view than you have in real life so obviously it does feel like you're looking through a letterbox so to speak but you know whether whether or not it's important to you is purely just going to depend on the types of games that you're playing and what you expect from a vr experience but is definitely a noticeable thing and the other thing i'm noticing straight away is that you do get some distortion around the outside now the sweet spot in terms of visual clarity is quite large here so i can look around quite comfortably and it's only really on the outer extremities so the last maybe 10 degrees or so that i'm starting to get to some distortion and similar to what we described with the 8k x headset as well what happens is the things on the outside of the image kind of just warp away so i can certainly identify with what people were saying about barrel distortion but what i would say is that it's not like the entire image is distorted throughout if i move the headset around i do see the image warping a little bit but as long as the headset is staying stable on my head and it's not moving around at all i'm not noticing you know things looking distorted within the usable range of my field of view it's just that kind of outside extremity area where it starts to look a little bit funny so if i look around outside the window for example everything looks nice and square i'm not seeing any weird you know warping or anything funny going on in any straight lines let's walk around the environment a little bit here now too just move around i guess the things that are standing out is just how natural the colors look i mean i am colorblind so i do need to disclose that i'm probably not the best judge of that but i mean what i see through the headset compared to what i see in the real world is very very very close i don't see an overly saturated image i don't see under exaggerated or over exaggerated blacks everything just looks very very very accurately reproduced which to me is something that's very important because anything like that which doesn't look realistic takes away from the immersion and reminds you when you're inside a game that it isn't real and i can see myself despite the more restricted field of view that i have with this headset compared to some others just that clarity is enough that it's going to draw me into the experience and i can really see myself getting lost and you know so immersed in the experience that i get lost and forget that i'm actually wearing a vr headset and because the thing's so comfortable as well i do just need to make a small adjustment there i have it sitting a little bit high there we go that's a bit better yeah once it's adjusted correctly you know it is so light and comfortable you just don't even notice that you're wearing it but let's jump into google earth and let's have a look at some really wide open landscape and then we'll jump into some sim racing titles okay so google earth vr huge globe right in front of my eyes here and i definitely do feel like i have tunnel vision with this headset on so it's definitely having that smaller field of view compared to something like an 8k x it's definitely you know it doesn't have that same immediate wow factor that you have with that despite the despite the clarity that we're getting here but when i get in and i look at details on the cities around this is absolutely mind-blowing so it's it's it's funny because it's like it's a trade-off you're trading off that field of view for clarity in the middle and again like i can only speak from what's important to me and what's important to you is going to be different depending on the types of games you're playing or the kinds of experiences that you're wanting out of vr but it's a shame that you can't have both but at this point in time for me i think i would take this level of clarity over the field of view because i know that my brain will adjust to this field of view and it will become more natural but just looking around these settings i mean the things that really stand out to me is just the crispness in the optics is absolutely incredible it's like nothing i've seen before and you know i really i really really have to focus hard to make out any pixels whatsoever like it if if what i was looking at was photo realistic then it i would have trouble distinguishing from the real world which is you know pretty incredible when we think of where vr was just a couple of years ago but in terms of horizons and things like that barrel distortion i'm really not noticing it just looking around like this like if i move my head up and down or move the headset around on my head i can see the horizon warping up and down but you know as long as the headset is perched correctly on my head i just don't see that being a problem and again i'm just trying to describe to you guys what i'm seeing in the experience that i'm having so that hopefully when you watch all these different reviews and you're kind of you're getting an understanding of what different people are experiencing based on their own expectations you can kind of read between the lines and get a clear picture of what it's likely to be for you and your expectation but oh the colors just look so natural the blacks are so deep and rich and yeah it this is this is really something else this is i don't like to use the word game changer because i know that it's a bit of a cliche but this is really something special just the way that sunlight glows across it's another thing that i'm looking at here as well as a transition in gradients between light blue and dark blue as i look across the sky as well there's a little bit of banding going on there i don't know whether that's just native to google earth rather than something that i'm seeing through the headset you guys will be able to see from the screen capture whether or not that's present there so you guys will be able to see that for yourselves but yeah the color transitions are really great i'm really just not seeing anything at all here that stands out as being problematic other than just the fact that you do have that sense that you're looking through a letterbox or a ned kelly mask or something like that but yeah this is really something special one thing that i am noticing in high contrast situations and i noticed this when we were looking around on the virtual desktop before but it's probably more pronounced now that i'm looking at a scene like this with a really hard edge and i think the next little screen that we get here as well with the overlay yeah there we go so we've got a a dark background here with a white bar across the top now if i look straight through the center of the display everything looks crisp everything looks absolutely fine but if i start to tilt my head up and tilt my eyes down so you guys will be able to see with the with the eye tracking what i'm doing here so i'm tilting my head up and i'm looking down towards the bottom of the panels what i'm seeing is some chromatic aberration what i mean by that is separation between the colors and as they're reaching my eye obviously different colors have different wavelengths and how they travel through a lens varies and how it actually reaches a focal point can vary slightly depending on your position relative to the lens so when i look down like that what i'm seeing is a kind of greenish yellow band across the top and if i go down i see the same thing again but a bluish purple band across the top so what happens is as long as i'm looking through the very center of the screen i'm absolutely fine but as soon as i start to sort of move my head around and look at edges like that so if i look with my head to the left here and aiming my eyes to the right to look at the edge of that screen i'm seeing a really hard green line down the right hand edge or down the left hand edge of that google earth overlay i should say where the gray and gray and white areas are if i do the same on the other side here i'm getting the same thing again as well so it's definitely i can see again looking at that looking at that button down the bottom of the magnifying glass the top edge of that looks kind of yellowish green and the bottom half of it looks kind of a purply blue color so yeah that is a classic example of chromatic aberration i wouldn't say that it is overpowering but i would say that the slight barrel distortion that you get on the outer edges of the field of view as well as that chromatic aberration as well as the restricted field of view that you have at 115 degrees those are definitely the three key limitations of this headset at least as it stands right now in prototype form and you know for those three reasons i would say you know it's definitely not the perfect vr headset there's definitely a way to go in terms of the technology i think if we could have that 8k x field of view without the chromatic aberration without the slight barrel distortion but with this level of clarity and you know resolution it would it would be absolutely incredible but pop the headset off again now and again that's very comfortable didn't have any problems with eye strain my face still feels nice and fresh i don't feel sweaty i don't feel claustrophobic and those are definitely things that i can't say for other vr headsets so definitely happy there but let's jump into some some racing titles now we'll start off with eye racing wanna again like we did with the akx check out the frame rate see what kind of sacrifices we have to make in terms of visual fidelity to get that 90 frames per second to match the native refresh rate of the panels here and uh yeah see what the experience is like in eye racing first then we'll go into automobile lister two and a set of corsa competition okay so sitting in the cabin of a mercedes w12 f1 car here at silverstone in iracing the first thing that i noticed immediately jumping into a sim is just again that visual clarity this immediately transports me into feeling like i'm sitting in the actual car like it it's just the amount of immersion that i'm getting here the level of immersion is just not like anything that i've experienced before even with the 8k x and even with that extended field of view what i'm noticing just sitting in the cabin here is that the usable field of view even just sitting here looking around inside the car and also considering the fact that you know you'd be wearing a helmet in the real world as well the field of view does actually feel quite natural to me so i don't feel like i'm missing out on anything just sitting here in the cabin now the frame rate at the moment as it sits is about 65 frames per second that's with the graphics here maxed out in eye racing now one of the things that we will explore when we do the full review is the impact of different hardware on the performance so we're running a 30 90 here with an 11 900k running at 5.2 gigahertz clocked on all cores um they recommend at least a 30 70 or 2080 graphics card for this headset so we'll see how the frame rate goes once we're out on track but let's drive out now one of the things i absolutely love about vr that you just don't get with large triple screens even like the rig that we have is the ability to actually look up and over the cabin look down at the wheels and spot how things are interfacing so we can see for example if we look down exactly how close our tire is to the ripple strip and so forth and obviously that's going to depend on the car that you're driving but immediately this just feels really really natural i did admittedly struggle a little bit adapting to the 8k x and i think it was because i had issues with the screen flickering and a couple other little problems which we highlighted in the review of that headset and i was able to get those problems sorted out but this we were sitting pretty solidly at about 70 frames per second here with the same graphics settings that we're giving us about 60 to 65 with the pi max so the frame rate again on my specific hardware isn't massively higher than it was with the pimax at kx which is interesting i thought it might be [Music] but yeah i mean this this is just absolutely insane levels of immersion and it's all just down to that visual clarity what i can tell you again is i'm not noticing any sort of barrel distortion in this context either other than just a little bit of funny business going on right at the very top of my field of view so if i pay attention to it i can see the halo above my head kind of warping and distorting right in that last sort of five percent of the field of view [Music] which is a little bit off-putting if you pay attention to it [Music] but certainly like when you're focusing on the road directly in front of you it's definitely not something that i'm really noticing or paying attention to so but again just that visual clarity [Music] and that nice big sweet spot in terms of not having any [Music] visual distortion or lack of focus i think that's probably one of the big things actually now i pay a little bit more attention to it is the chromatic aberration aside which i'm not really noticing in this context to be honest with you unless i really look over right at my mirrors without turning my head [Music] i think one of the outstanding things with this is that the sweet spot in terms of focus is so large so i'm not getting weird distortion and weird sort of blurring effects going on and you guys can see from the uh from the overlay where i'm looking on the road with the eye tracking so you get a good sense of where i'm looking in the um looking in terms of the field of view but yeah it just it's really drawing me into the environment i mean this is again in eye racing where the graphics aren't that amazing so i think the best thing to do now is to jump into automobilista 2 which is a really really immersive game anyway [Music] and see what the experience is like there but yeah this is again i don't like to use the term game changer because i feel like it doesn't leave any more room for improvement and there definitely is a lot of room for improvement in terms of you know just the field of view it would be you know if we could have this level of clarity but with a massive field of view it really would be absolutely amazing but where this is really shining for me just right now in eye racing is just having that clarity having that you know immense detail in what i'm seeing really just draws me in and particularly in a car like this where you are quite enclosed you know you do have barriers quite close to the sides you can see that slight bit of near clip near clipping going on which unfortunately we can't dial out an eye racing we have adjusted the ini file but it's just always going to be there in this car i think but you know in an environment where you do feel quite encased in the car anyway it does feel quite natural and you know you would have to turn your head to sort of glance at the mirrors and you know even just the fact that the you know the view in the mirror does move around relative to your head position all those little things that you don't get with triple screens when you combine it with this level of visual clarity it really is something else and i i could and i don't say this lightly but i could honestly see myself using this headset for sim racing over my triple screens which is not something that i would say for any other headset that i've tried to date obviously for content creation it's different and we would still use the triple screens for content creation but yeah this this really is something else so let's jump into automobile lister 2 now okay so auto mobilista 2 around bathurst now i knew this was going to look good because we tested it with the pi max 8kx recently but the clarity here is just something else it really it's pulling me into the virtual world [Music] see if we can stay with this lead bunch here just looking around the environment everything is so i guess the thing that's standing out to me the most here is just how natural the colors look one of their complaints that i've had about a lot of games in general is just they do tend to have have a little bit of a cartoonish look to them and the color reproduction through this headset is just so natural the contrast between the outside and the inside of the car is fantastic as well looking around inside the cabin you've got really nice deep blacks not quite to the same level as you've had with oled panels of course but very very close you can see the particles and the sun rail the you know the sunlight rays and everything's shining through as well they look natural there's no sort of weird god ray effects going on through the headset or anything like that it all looks very natural [Music] come down the mountain now try to keep it under control to leave space there on the outside [Music] i mean it's so much to take in all at once here but [Music] it's genuinely scary driving down the mountain there because you're so immersed in what's going on [Music] and although like i you know i don't i don't have that field of view that i had with the pymax akx and it is noticeable like it doesn't have that initial wow factor potentially if field of view is your thing whoa big twitch the visual clarity that it gives you is a wow factor and it's in and of itself so for me personally i think i would prefer to have that visual clarity over the field of view because as we said in the akx review [Music] even though you have the field of view it's not necessarily usable information because it is blurry outside that area you do still have to turn your head to actually look at the mirrors just like what you have to do here as well so while it's not quite so immersive in that sense [Music] it is easier to get better performance in automobile listener 2 with this headset than it was with the um with the pymax just because of the slight low resolution i think we're running into gpu bottlenecks here before we did with eye racing so didn't have quite such an impact in eye racing but let me get up the inside here [Music] yeah this is just something else i mean it's [Music] it's not perfect and i mean if i look if i look over the mirror there just to give you an example i can see a bit of that chromatic aberration going on just on the hard edge of my white mirror there so it's not perfect but just looking around inside the cabin man my driving's terrible i'm trying to concentrate on what's going on and talk and do all those things apologies for that but you know just looking around inside the cabin things like the text on the dash there very very clear to read easy to read i can read the text on the right hand side there on the button box too and there's no chromatic aberration going on there so as long as as long as you're within that sort of sweet spot and the sweet spot is quite large [Music] with this headset [Music] it's very comfortable [Music] yeah this is uh this is a game changer for me in ams2 no question about it i could very comfortable comfortably drive like this all day i'm not noticing you know the headset's presence on my head either doesn't feel any less comfortable than just wearing a helmet to be honest i'm not feeling pressure on my nose anything like that this is a really really really fantastic experience so let's jump into acc now and see how the experience translates there okay so i said of course corporation now we've had to make a few adjustments here to our visual quality just to get the frame rate up as i would expect with this game unfortunately it's not as well optimized for vr as automobilista 2 is and as such to get that frame rate up to an acceptable level where we can drive and you know have things nice and smooth and not jumping around we have had to introduce some resolution scaling so what that means is that i am sacrificing that visual fidelity which i enjoyed so much in ams too so it is a sacrifice and i was expecting it to be a necessary sacrifice here but let's just get underway here [Music] good launch yeah and it's just having that having that visual fidelity turned down just having that slight blurriness in the distance it just takes away from that immersion because it lets you know that you're playing a game it reminds you that it's not real whereas in ams 2 i was really finding that i was just getting lost in the game so like i can't read the text on the back of those cars in front of me there for example but i can read the dash and everything just fine so it doesn't stop me from seeing the things that i need to see it's just pulling away from that immersion now if they do integrate vrss 2.0 into automobilista 2 which i'm hoping they will then that would potentially change it so it is a limitation of the pc hardware again remembering we are running a 30 90 here with an 11 900k so the lower the system is that you have the the worse this is going to be for you so definitely something to be aware of here but i am definitely having to crank the graphics down quite a bit to get a good experience now the other thing you could do of course is reduce the visual quality and increase the uh or decrease the amount of res of the amount of resolution scaling as well so if you didn't mind having crappy looking shadows or you know dodgy looking textures and no effects and things like that then you could bring back that detail in terms of the crispness but again it's just a trade-off that you need to be aware of but really other than that everything else all the observations that we had in um in ams2 pretty much relate here as well the color clarity is great i can read all the text just fine and um yeah it's a very immersive experience just not quite as immersive because of those sacrifices that we have to make so being a prototype unit i don't want to call this conclusions on the aero headset because there are still a few things that could change but look as far as the experience stands right now with what we have here in our hands it is an absolutely amazing headset particularly in the context of sim racing where you know for me the field of view isn't quite so important as visual clarity the amount of clarity the amount of detail that we get in this headset provided you do have a high end system to actually allow you to have that amount of detail and still maintain a decent frame rate this is absolutely amazing so definitely my favorite headset that i've tested to date for sim racing out of the 8k x and the g1 and g2 hp reverb headsets obviously it is very expensive as well though far and away the most expensive headset that we've tested here at boosted media and more than double the price well more than double the price of an hp reverb g2 does it give you double the experience look really it's just going to come down to what's important to you i think if if visual clarity and you know really sort of just immersing yourself in an almost photo realistic environment is what's most important to you then this is probably the closest that you're going to be able to get at this point in time at least in the consumer space it definitely has more visual clarity in it than the pimax 8kx does overall but obviously that is at the sacrifice of that horizontal field of view and vertical field of view as well it doesn't go as high either so what i found with the 8k x by comparison is that when you first put it on particularly in things like google earth where you know things aren't flying at you so much you put it on and you're just absolutely blown away by the expanse of what's in front of you and you know when you put this on it does feel like you're looking through a letterbox by comparison i can imagine for people that are coming from a headset that has a wider field of view than this does they may be disappointed with it and again it's just going to come down to what you're expecting what you're wanting out of a headset but i think for the context of sim racing which is my specialty you know what this gives you in terms of that quality is more than enough for me to overcome the loss of field of view and when you consider that that information within that wider field of view isn't necessarily useful anyway because it is blurry with a lot of other headsets you are you are ultimately having to turn your head to see the detail in those in those areas anyway which you have to do with this headset too so when it comes down to the actual sweet spot in the visual range it's pretty much the same as the 8k x at least for me it really just comes down to that extra immersion of having that field of view as opposed to not having the field of view but i guess to summarize this is an absolutely exceptionally good headset i really like how comfortable it is as well i didn't find that it was cumbersome on my head i didn't find that i was going oh i want to take this off i want to take this off halfway through a race or anything like that um yeah i mean i did have it on my head in the process of recording this review for you know over an hour at a time at points and never did it sort of become uncomfortable and having that airflow through as well was quite comfortable i didn't find that it ended up drying out my eyes like i thought might be a problem no different from just being outside or in a room that's air-conditioned really so you do notice it when you first put the headset on and that might be a little bit weird for some people i didn't notice anywhere in the software the ability to switch it on and off but you know i don't think it's going to be a problem for anybody unless you suffer from dry or something like that so is this the perfect vr headset in the last vr headset that you're ever going to purchase i would say probably not i mean one of the big things that you are going to have to consider here is the price point and you know there are some there's some pretty heavy limitations on this headset still depends you know despite how good it is so we do have the field of view limitation which i would love to see increased in the future we do still have that slight barrel distortion as well which for me isn't a big deal particularly in the context of sim racing i just didn't find that it was something that i noticed but it may bother some people and the fact that it is there may be a detractor for some people we do also have that chromatic aberration as well which was a little bit worse than i'd hoped it would be with this headset it wasn't an issue at all with on the pimax at kx for example so i think that just comes down to the difference in the optics that are being used here with a spherical lenses as opposed to fresnel lenses but definitely a limitation there as well and i'd say for me that's probably the biggest limitation that's the one thing that kind of draws me out and you know reminds me that i'm inside a game as opposed to being in reality i kind of found that over time i adjusted to that restricted field of view but the chromatic aberration was something that did still kind of you know grabbed my attention from time to time and again in the context of sim racing really not a big deal but in any other sort of environment where you're paying attention to fine details you know moving around more slowly you don't have things rushing at you i do think that it is something that you will notice so it's definitely something that i think needs to be called out but for me you know those are the three big areas and i guess the big question is you know if you're going to be dropping this kind of coin on a vr headset what's the resale value going to be like in a couple of years time will there be something you know a huge leap ahead again in technology in the next couple of years will we see those limitations lifted at this point in time i just don't know and i mean i compare this to where vr was the first experience i had with vr was my hp reverb g1 which was just a little bit over two years ago now and this is a massive leap forward from that there's absolutely no question there at all but you know the fact that things like this exist now do obviously impact the resale value of the older units and you do have to question when you're spending this kind of money on a headset you know in two years time what kind of money you're going to be able to get for this if you do wish to upgrade again so if money isn't a thing for you i would say yeah go ahead and buy it enjoy it for what it is right now but if you're waiting and you know hoping for the ultimate vr headset i would say we're still not quite there yet i would say the the uh the the technology is i guess in its adolescence i would say i said it was in its infancy a couple of years ago when we tested the g1 and the g2 hp reverb headsets i would say it's in its adolescence now and i'm really excited to see where these things go but i think what is really awesome here is that we are starting to see that commercial and industrial technology stepping down into consumer grade stuff and although the price point is still very high it's definitely a lot more affordable than it was a couple of years ago so this is definitely a massive leap forward in terms of vr technology but it's not the absolute ultimate be-all and end-all vr headset that i know a lot of people were hoping for and i think it's important to manage that expectation appropriately there as well so i'm really excited to see what the what the retail versions of these are like hopefully they'll send us one over to check out as well we will be sending this pre-production unit back and there's a couple more things that i want to record before we do that i want to check out microsoft flight sim i want to check out a couple of other vr titles like boneworks and half-life alex as well but i wanted to keep this video focused on where my expertise are which is more within the sim racing side so hopefully this video has helped you out and answered a lot of your questions obviously there are still some questions to be answered given that this is a pre-production prototype unit but yeah hopefully this has given you a good understanding if you are looking at pre-ordering one of these at least a benchmark for what sort of performance you can expect from this unit and what some of those likely limitations are going to be so leave a thumbs up if you've enjoyed the video consider subscribing as well if you haven't already obviously we will have a couple more videos coming up on this headset over the coming months uh assuming that we can hold on to it that long we'll see but yeah really impressed with this overall and i'm sure that you guys will be as well so thank you very much for watching guys i'll drop some links down in the description for more detail on the headset as well and uh yeah we'll see you again soon bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 219,289

Keywords: Varjo, Varjo Aero, Varjo Aero Review, Varjo Review, Best VR Headset, Best VR Review, Best VR, Best VR for Sim Racing, Pimax, Varjo vs Pimax, Varjo Aero vs Pimax 8KX, HP Reverb, Vr reviews, Boosted Media, iRacing, Best VR for iRacing, Best VR for Assetto Corsa, VR Graphics, VR sweet spot, Best VR for Automobilista 2, Most comfortable VR

Id: cGGStQ4KHNs

Length: 50min 1sec (3001 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 04 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/SottLimpa]

2000€

[u/rigo_ita]

a bit out of my budget as now but, nothing to say about the direction or evolution: simply stunning!.

[u/stealthradek]

Given the price point I'll pass, but it's good to see the boundaries pushed further and further. It'll become a reasonable norm in few years time.

[u/Maclittle13]

Nice, but way too expensive.

Nothing against Will, he always makes good content, but did anyone else get a popup ad for something called "Gabbyville?" It was a virtual receptionist site.

I couldn't close the popup. Clicking the x takes you to their site. It's like they put a transparent shape linking their page over the entire ad.

That's dirty YouTube...

I only got it on the embed version, but I think the ads are random. Just curious.

[u/jem454]

I'll wait a bit. Another year or two, and something similar will be along for half that price. Vr is till in it's infancy, and gpu's are just beginning to power them properly.