Hands-on: PiMAX’s 8K Headset Proves that High FOV VR is Coming
While there were many perhaps questionable Chinese VR headsets shown off at CES this year, Pimax’s new 8K, 200 degree prototype actually stood out from the crowd. Moreover, Pimax perhaps even showed both some of the potential that high spec headsets might provide along with the challenges associated with getting the details right.
The exterior of Pimax’s new prototype bears some resemblance to Starbreeze’s 210 degree StarVR headset (and the InfinitEye before it) but uses a PlayStation VR (PSVR) style mounting mechanism.
Pimax are also using fresnel lenses in this new headset, but interestingly, the ‘godray’ artifacts usually associated with these type of optics were actually very subtle. It’s entirely possible however that the low brightness of the displays may have played a part in that.
So alas, presence was non existent for me. However, playing Lucky’s Tale and Radial-G: Racing Revolved on the headset I could see how, once distortion is reduced and that binocular overlap increased, it might truly represent a new jump in visual quality for VR.
Brain-warp is a technique where you render and display an image to one eye only, and then render and display for the other eye, in a sequence such that one eye is seeing an image and the other isn’t at any given moment in time. This way, they’re actually rendering a single 4K image at 120 times a second, but the user perceives it as a complete 8K image at 120Hz. How? Because that frequency is high enough that we don’t perceive that one eye is blind while the other isn’t, at least for a tiny fraction of a second.