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Comment by deanc | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t it like watching potato quality? We had the first oculus rift at our office many years ago and there was an app to play video files in a movie theatre. But the resolution was so bad it was like watching a VHS. I see the potential here but the quality/resolution is going to have to take a huge leap.

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It is quite good. I have watched hours of shows and movies on the Quest 2. The resolution of your virtual cinema screen is essentially 1080p, which really is not bad. The main drawback is the quality of the lenses as they can add blur outside the sweet spot, god rays and chromatic aberration. I think these devices are only a few hardware generations away from delivering on the promise of a no compromises cinema in a bag.

My problem with VR is that I wear glasses — I never could get comfortable with a headset over my glasses.

Yeah, me either. They are definitely not designed to be worn over glasses comfortably. I ended up getting custom lenses that clip over the headset lenses because I play Beat Saber enough to justify it.

My oculus quest 1 works just fine over my glasses (had to add the little foam insert that came with it). Not sure about the 2, though.

You can buy prescription lenses from third parties that you insert into the headset. Then, no glasses are needed.

As a fellow glasses-wearer I can say that I've had a good experience with the Valve Index, which lets me adjust the distance between the lenses and my face enough that my glasses fit comfortably.

I've read that it's also possible, at least for some headsets and levels of correction, to purchase custom lenses such that you don't need glasses at all while wearing the headset.

I've used vroptician.com with my Valve Index and it works great.

I have a Quest 2, and I 3D printed some inserts from Thingiverse. They were designed to be used with the lenses from a specific set of glasses on Zenni Optical, which I ordered in my prescription (~$20).

Now I can use my Quest 2 without glasses :)

It seems a lot of people don't know about the jump in quality between the headsets that came out. The original oculus was leapfrogged fairly quickly by the HTC Vive, and then that was eventually superseded by later headsets like the pimax, Valve Index, and Quest. If you haven't tried any of them I definitely recommend testing one out, the difference is very noticeable.

Not only watching videos but even reading text is much easier in the latest headsets. Unfortunately many people have only tried the older or commodity VR solutions and think that's the limit of the technology. This is largely due to the price and physical setup required for some of the better headsets, but already there are some great setups out there.

Maybe? We also tried the same thing with the vive and it still was like looking at a potato IMO. Maybe the very latest devices are much better - I very much look forward to trying these.

It seems the lenses on the quest 2 are a bit of a hit-or-miss and vary in quality between each unit/batch.

My headset had a sweet-spot where the image was clear on maybe 5% of the screen, making it potato-vr for video and text. Others (on reddit) had the same complaints.

If you're considering buying one, make sure you're also able to return it in case the lens-quality of the batch is sub-par.

I had the same experience with Google Daydream (RIP). It's a really neat immersive experience to try out a couple times, but I could never seriously watch anything in there because it was just plain unpleasant.

I like the VHS comparison, but I would argue it's worse than that because you get a weird screen door effect if you're on any kind of angle that tends to distort things weirdly. I think Netflix had a decent tradeoff where the "screen" was rather large, but it feels like sitting in the front row of an IMAX where you're moving your head to see everything.

It should just come down to the source files and the hardware. The Quest 2 is 1832x1920 per eye but with the FOV it probably can only really render 1080p video if you're watching it in something like BigScreen.

I use mine to watch 3D movies and it's pretty great. I missed out on seeing Avatar in theaters so being able to watching it in 3D without waiting for a re-release or anything is convenient.

I don't own one so I can't say for sure, but if you mean the original oculus devkit that thing had terrible resolution compared to the quest 2 and others

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_realit...

Bigscreen VR lets you use local files. You can share them via e-mail with people who only have the headset and no PC, and they can use the occulus browser to download the file to the headset.

This essentially means the quality is up to you. I usually re-encode 1080p+ files to 720p to add volume gain and burn-in subtitles. It looks great, imo.

It's not incredible now, but it's a lot better than it once was. I watched a few movies on an airplane recently and I noticed some fuzziness at first, but stopped noticing it after a while.

This was on quest 1

Rift CV1 was 1080x1200 per eye, Quest 2 is 1832 x 1920 per eye. I haven't used one (have a Quest 1) but I hear it's quite good.

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