Topic: PlayStation VR2 and PlayStation VR2 Sense controller

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@Chibbie Following up here because the comments threads don't allow such long posts! For your focus issues, especially with Song in Smoke not being sharp, regardless of if you're seeing mura or not, and assuming you don't have a defective display or lens (which is possible), what you describe sounds much like an out of focus lens (think the same as a camera, or eyeglasses being wrong, etc.) Could be a defect, very possible, but if it's not and your new unit has the same issue the thing to remember is you're basically lining up binoculars. If you've ever used real binoculars or a telescope, you know how fussy then can be to get just right, it's the same thing. The position, the distance of the element from the eye, and the angle of the element in relation to the eye needs to be right. And the IPD but that's actually less important IMO, personally the IPD adjustment for me mostly affects a feeling of fatigue if it means my eyes are diverging or converging instead of looking straight, and seeing more ghosted nosepiece in my vision if it's set wrong, not so much a true blurriness.

Day 1, when I put it on I had the headband high so the visor was "straight" on my head. I had to clamp it too tight, and the sides and bottom were blurry. After I read about pulling the headband down in the back, things were much better. I pulled it down just above the neck, and it was more comfortable and much clearer. But I did find some fatigue with that, and an awkward angle where displays were always kind of "High" in my vision, and the sides and top were still kind of blurry with a fussy sweet spot. Not bad, but less perfect than I'd prefer.

Two days ago I was playing with it and discovered I'd still been doing it wrong. The headband (for my head) has to be more near the middle of the head, namely the result is that the visor is more LEVEL in line with my face, I had it angled too high, and before that too low. This seems obvious....but somehow it wasn't until I realized it. Basically putting the visor on so it SEEMED level was too low (headband high) puttting it on so the band seemed right (band low, visor high) was too high. The middle is just right (Seems obvious...but isn't!)

So here's how I put it on now. I put the headband just below middle of the back of my head, with the visor extended out fully. Then align the visor while looking at the display (usually says "please connect your controller" or something like that at that point, just looking into the eyepieces as I adjust the front down/up, until the text is pretty clear. I tighten the band (not too much, you're not tying a tourniquet, you're just fastening it so it's steady.), Then I slide in the visor. NOT TOO FAR, there's a "right" setting for the visor. You don't have to smush the light shield into your face, any contact is enough. You want to adjust the visor so the light shield just makes contact with your face, and MAYBE one more click than that. Ultimately there's a correct focal distance for the screen from your eyes to look right. Maybe closer (smushed in) or farther (less FOV but that's fine.) Just adjust the visor to whatever distance is the RIGHT one for you, where you're focusing INTO the screen and not on the MURA/filter on the screen.

Then do whatever IPD calibration you need. Ignore the built-in IPD screen. It's annoying and inaccurate IMO, and it somehow thinks I have a lazy eye pointing the wrong direction when I don't....it's weird....and messes up results. Just turn the wheel till it feels right and you're fine.

You only have to fuss with this once. After you do this you know how to put it on and can count how many clicks you like for each piece, and can do it easily and repeatably with minimal pushing and adjusting. Your head isn't my head so the specifics may change. But the biggest thing to keep in mind is not to put it on thinking it's VR, but to think it's binoculars. You don't need to start games and see how it goes, etc, you can just use the text on the UI. It's either clear as you align the lenses or it isn't, just like looking at real life through binoculars. You know if it's right or wrong as you pull it in front of your eyes, you don't need to playtest to find out. We're tempted to make it a lot more difficult than it really is.

With this new position I now have found even the far edges are only slightly soft, like a camera with a backfocus bias, not "super blurry with fresnel rings showing at the far edge" like the position I previously thought was right but wasn't.

Part of the mura/grain issue comes from the lens issue. Because of course if the lens isn't in the right position to be focused, your eyes are going to focus on the most in-focus thing, and that's going to be the mura on the physical screen surface if the image itself isn't in focus.

Horizon and GT7 and ResE are just going to be softer than simpler all-VR games, because 3 reasons:
A More graphically demanding games aren't running full res and thus are softer
B Anti-Aliasing is designed for 2D still and more complex polygons have more heavy AA and texture filtering which will just naturally yield softer edges and less defined textures,
C slower framerates mean frame doubling and thus more motion blur from the OLED.

And expectations have to be set, "sharp" will never mean as sharp as a 4k TV in VR right now, because you're seeing half the resolution with each eye, and the nature of reflections and specularization in video games means there's a sort of shimmery/holographic aspect in VR, because your eyes are basically seeing an interlaced composite image. So if you're looking for "sharp" to mean quite as sharp as a 2D game it's definitely not going to look that way. But I think your brain will register "sharp" or "not sharp" properly in terms of eye focus regardless as long as you don't have unrealistic expectations of "4k TV but in 3D" which is a long way away, not just because we'd need at least 8k vr at 90fps minimum to do that, but also because game engines just aren't at the same level of optical illusionry for VR as it is for 2D yet.

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An updated version of the above for @h15c0r3r GT7 is maybe one of the harder games to "calibrate your eyes" with, because the image past a certain distance is a little soft (i.e. cars are sharp when your racing with the pack and getting boxed in but if you fall behind the pack they'll get fuzzy. It may be easier to use a different game for any adjusting. However, you mentioning the dials are not sharp does hint that you're not quite in the sweet spot to me. The car interior is very crisp and sharp in my experience, it's what you see to the sides of the track or maybe 3 car lengths away that's soft.

"One simple trick" (haha) I've started using when putting my headset on is actually just turn on the the console with the PS button on only one of the VR sense controllers (I use the Right controller) and start putting the headset on with it powered on, nothing tightened up. You should see the B&W pass-through camera, with a gray floating UI box telling you to turn your other controller on in the center. I've found shifting the headset around until that box is razor sharp edge to edge, with clear text (and there is a sweet spot where it's razor sharp edge to edge with clear text) helps me land the approximate right spot first time every time. A little double vision or weird stereo overlap is fine there because you haven't dialed the IPD yet or moved the visor to your eye's focus point yet, it's with the visor fully extended. But you should be able to see the corners and text of that box move in and out of focus as you rotate, raise, and lower the headset around your head.

I find I hit the "external view" button for the pass through camera often if I take the headset off and put it back on again because I find that's the easiest screen to position it properly and quickly, though I don't always do it and still get good results now that I have a feel for what looks right and doesn't.

Once you get a "roughly good spot" with that, then I tighten the rear dial down a bit, and start moving the visor closer. The "right" spot will be different for every person, but I do find getting the visor positioned at the "right" closeness is critical to how clear the image will appear across the screen, and your and the first guess won't be the right one because IPD isn't dialed in yet. Just approximate what seems right-ish, then go to the IPD adjustment screen.

The IPD screen is helpful and harmful at the same time when trying to figure out how to set it. It often shows me, almost every single time that I have put the headset on slanted. I never think I do, and every single time I check that screen and there's a darned slant! So I adjust the position. It also often shows I have a lazy/googly eye pointing the wrong way even though I don't. This also tends to mean I have it at a weird angle and the tracking sensor is looking at me from an off-angle. If this angle is off, then foveated rendering may end up rendering the wrong part of the screen because it thinks you're looking somewhere other than where you are! If I'm playing and everything in one eye feels "wrong", I check the IPD screen because odds are I have the sesnsors angled somehow and it thinks I'm looking the wrong place.

The screen is helpful, but don't take it for gospel. I adjust it and it tells me it's set right with my eyes centered, but my eyes generally tell me it has me set too far apart, and I need it a little closer to feel natural.

Last step adjust the visor closeness. You may need it so close it's touching your eyelashes (and smearing oil on the lenses) or you might need it so far it's like binoculars. Only your eyes can tell you the right distance, and you might need to spend days doing this until you really understand what distance your eyes and brain like the most because every time I thought it was right, it wasn't...and then one day I got it and it was so obvious I don't understand how I didn't get it before. At first I had it WAY too close, then I overcorrected and had it way too far. I now have it in close enough that it does leave a goggles indendation on my face when I take it off, but not so close my eyelashes smear oil on it (unless I look straight up and the weight presses it down enough that they do touch, but I blame Tallneck gawking in Horizon for that. )

This all sounds amazingly complicated and convoluted! It really isn't. The first time you do it and go through all these motions, or first several times, it seems like a lot, but once you nail it the first time or two, you'll get it pretty reliably because by instinct you just know where to position it and what feels right and wrong. I spent 70 hours figuring out it was wrong and probably 10 hours across days trying to get it dialed in like this. Once I figured out the spot, I slap it on and dial it in in 2 minutes flat plus occasional microsdjustments every time.

But if the car interiors in GT aren't sharp, the PS UI isn't very clear (I won't say "sharp" because the UI is only 1080p so it'll never look sharp, but it'll look like it has very high clarity of a not-so sharp UI), if games like Song in the Smoke (free demo for calibrating if desired) aren't razor sharp with a reasonable FOV of sharpness before the lenses make the edges blurry, you're almost certainly not adjusted to the right position! (except for the far edges, especially left/right which is blurry due to the Fresnel optics and can't be helped.)

I do blame the device for having such a narrow sweetspot that this even has to be written up and someone with prior VR experience like yourself can end up having a hard time finding the sweet spot. However the actual range of clear optics is actually larger than PSVR1. When in the sweetspot I definitely get a much wider field of clear view, that's clearer overall, than in PSVR1. And when it is in the right spot and looks clear it actually looks very clear, and games that aren't clear because the game itself is a bit blurry, at least look like a clear view of a screen showing a blurry rendered game

For anyone that finds the sweet spot right away PSVR2 is impressively clear (thus the reviews.) For anyone that doesn't, it looks like a disappointment from expectations and it's so hard to explain how to work it to find the spot where it actually looks like the way you expected it to before you got it. That view is in there(probably depending on expectations)....you just have to work to find it

The only REAL visual limitations (once you get the right spot) are the fact that that spot can be so hard to find, the fact that the Fresnel lenses do make the far edges somewhat increasingly blurry the farther to the edges you go, and the motion persistence of the OLED on games running less than 90fps that increases with brightness from none at 0 brightness to high at max.

But it does genuinely look seriously good, assuming you can find that spot (and that your own head/eye shapes don't make that unrealistically difficult, I suppose!)

@Chibbie may also find it helpful still, especially since previously I told you to have the visor too far out (based on my own eyes) and have since learned that for me I actually need it much closer (but not as close as I had it before.)

It's a pain that the sweet spot is so frustrating or impossible seeming, but if you can find it, it really does look great!