SVVR 2015 Quick HMD comparison

Just attended the first day of Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) conference 2015. Here are my quick thoughts on the HMDs I looked at.

Samsung S6 Gear VR. The S6 Gear VR resolution definitely looked better than the Note 4. Field of view was smaller as the edges of the fields were clipped. The colors were beautiful as ever due to the OLED panel. Performance was better as I didn’t notice any of the stutter that I frequently see in the Note 4 Gear VR. Really nice HMD. Really proves that mobile can be pretty good if done correctly.

Sony Morpheous. Very cool looking design. My first time using it. Resolution looks slightly better than Oculus DK2 due to the RGB pixel structure instead of Pentile. Colors were more washed out compared to DK2 because Morpheous has a 1080p LCD. Apparently when released Morpheous will have a 1080p OLED so colors should be much better. Performance was great and demos were awesome. Head tracking was very smooth. It did feel a bit cheap though. I could hear the plastic groaning and flexing as the HMD was fitted to my head. Had a bit of a hard time keeping the image sharp as the headset kept moving around slightly. I’ll probably buy a PS4 and this HMD when it comes out.

Oculus Cresent Bay. This HMD looked nice. Very cool demos. Resolution seemed about on par with Samsung S6 Gear VR. I could see pixels but they were small. Not sure about the panel structure but I could see diagonal lines of green and white pixels. Also the screen door was there but hard to see. It was almost as if they’re blurring the screen a bit to hide the screen door. This was a trick used on older HMDs as well. Can’t be confirmed but it seemed like it. Most of the time you forgot about the pixels. There was a strong halo effect when white text or objects were on the screen. This halo affect has been mentioned by other reviewers. Overall a nice HMD. Very light. This is probably what CK1 will be but in a redesigned housing. Wish resolution was higher. I’ll either buy this or the HTC Vive but probably not both.

OSVR hacker kit. Tried this HMD again. I still don’t like it. It always seems to make me feel a bit sick as the optics never seem quite right. I did focus and adjust IPD. Also, both times I’ve tried it the demo stuttered quite a bit. For a $200 headset you probably can’t beat it.

Zeiss One. Really bad. The optics are clear but distortion just isn’t right and overall a bad experience. I tried it with an LG phone which supposedly had S6 like resolution. Also tried it with an iPhone. They really shouldn’t show their HMD without proper distortion correction. It shows badly.

I did try some other cell phone based HMDs. They were all terrible as expected. The Samsung Gear VR is the only one I’ve ever tried that is worth buying. It’s far better than anything else. Far far better.

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