Watching 3D Movies on VR (Virtual Reality) Headsets

[RefractiveIndex]

Originally Posted by erikottowegner

What's the quality of watching a 3D movie on the Oculus vs a 3D tv?

Oculus wipes the floor with a 3D TV if you have it setup properly.

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

My current 3D VR theatre setup.

MPC-HC with LAV filters->MADVR(upscaled to 4k)->virtual desktop Steam edition->HighMax Cinema dark version(based on the old IMAX theatre in Sydney)->Oculus Quest 2 VR headset wired link 500mb/s.

I passthrough the audio to the Sony MDR-HW700 cinema headphones.

Very happy now with my own personal IMAX theatre . Oculus Quest 2 has very little noticeable SDE in practice. A lot of what people describe as the SDE is actually the loss of detail in the image when blowing up a 1080p source onto a massive virtual screen. Upscaling to 4k solves this issue if your PC has the horsepower to do it.

My setup is very similar to yours except I use the Quest 1 and I connect to my AV receiver for full surround/Atmos sound. I recently found that I don't need to upscale to 4K anymore to get the same amount of detail. I think the SDE on the Quest 2 will be less than the Quest 1. But I rarely notice it unless I go looking for it.

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by erikottowegner

What's the quality of watching a 3D movie on the Oculus vs a 3D tv?

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

Oculus wipes the floor with a 3D TV if you have it setup properly.

I love watching 3D movies on my Oculus. But contrast and color are king and an OLED Passive 3D TV has that in spades. The Oculus 1 "might" match the OLED TV for contrast and colors but will loose out overall because of SDE. Oculus 2 has much less SDE but the lenses will have visibly poorer color and contrast.

Where VR handily beats a 3D TV is in the overall viewing experience of watching a movie on a massive screen. 3D IMAX+3D Audio (Atmos/DTS:x) is awesome. Add a bass shaker and you have a mini 4DX setup at home

[RefractiveIndex]

Originally Posted by cdx47

I love watching 3D movies on my Oculus. But contrast and color are king and an OLED Passive 3D TV has that in spades. The Oculus 1 "might" match the OLED TV for contrast and colors but will loose out overall because of SDE. Oculus 2 has much less SDE but the lenses will have visibly poorer color and contrast.

Where VR handily beats a 3D TV is in the overall viewing experience of watching a movie on a massive screen. 3D IMAX+3D Audio (Atmos/DTS:x) is awesome. Add a bass shaker and you have a mini 4DX setup at home

Upscaling to 4K worked wonders improving the colour and contrast on the Quest 2 to my eye. Along with increasing encoding rate to 500mb/s and there was more details in the blacks and less banding.

Anyway I'm excited to see what next gen headsets bring. I can see myself abandoning TV and projectors permanently within the next 5 years.

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

Upscaling to 4K worked wonders improving the colour and contrast on the Quest 2 to my eye. Along with increasing encoding rate to 500mb/s and there was more details in the blacks and less banding.

Anyway I'm excited to see what next gen headsets bring. I can see myself abandoning TV and projectors permanently within the next 5 years.

Ahh the banding is an issue with certain scenes in a few movies although I've never had issues with artefacts (outside of my 60fps frame interpolation). Increasing the encoding rate a little helps. But increasing the Encode Resolution Width helps a lot more to the point where I don't need to increase the encoding rate so high anymore. The max encoding width is 4064 so have fun I found with upscaling that my brain was telling me the results were better and maybe they were a little. But not enough to be running my GPU fans on high. At 1080p all my fans are pretty much silent.

I going to be trying another headset soon so I "might" be moving off Oculus. Not going to say anything more quite yet but if I don't mention it here again then I've probably gone back to Oculus

[cdx47]

So I picked up a used Vive Pro 2 and I've spent the last day or so setting it up. But I can't stand the lower contrast and poor black levels. Yes the resolution is better but compared to the Quest, it's like the whole screen through a grey haze. There's a lot more to the story but bottom line is it's going back and I'm staying with the Quest for now

[RefractiveIndex]

Originally Posted by cdx47

So I picked up a used Vive Pro 2 and I've spent the last day or so setting it up. But I can't stand the lower contrast and poor black levels. Yes the resolution is better but compared to the Quest, it's like the whole screen through a grey haze. There's a lot more to the story but bottom line is it's going back and I'm staying with the Quest for now

I see. I will wait for next gen headsets and see if it's worth an upgrade.

BTW, I found that setting the brightness to 20% in virtual desktop dramatically improves the colour and contrast in the Oculus Quest 2. I didn't realise how much the backlight was washing out the colours and boosting the blacks until I tried watching The Batman in 2D this week. The movie was unwatchable until I made the adjustment and now everything else looks so much better as well

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

I see. I will wait for next gen headsets and see if it's worth an upgrade.

BTW, I found that setting the brightness to 20% in virtual desktop dramatically improves the colour and contrast in the Oculus Quest 2. I didn't realise how much the backlight was washing out the colours and boosting the blacks until I tried watching The Batman in 2D this week. The movie was unwatchable until I made the adjustment and now everything else looks so much better as well

Decreasing the backlight will effectively increase the contrast but at the cost of shadow detail. It's why I stuck with OLED and why I couldn't keep the Vive Pro 2. But OLED lenses can be both gratifying and frustrating, sometimes in the same movie. The deep black is perfect in Space for Gravity, but SDE is also visible with the stars. I think I can reduce it but maybe at the cost of overall sharpness (something I will look into). But the extra contrast makes many digitally shot movies like Prometheus look as good as some 4K discs.

[RefractiveIndex]

Originally Posted by cdx47

Decreasing the backlight will effectively increase the contrast but at the cost of shadow detail. It's why I stuck with OLED and why I couldn't keep the Vive Pro 2. But OLED lenses can be both gratifying and frustrating, sometimes in the same movie. The deep black is perfect in Space for Gravity, but SDE is also visible with the stars. I think I can reduce it but maybe at the cost of overall sharpness (something I will look into). But the extra contrast makes many digitally shot movies like Prometheus look as good as some 4K discs.

Yes there is a slight loss of black detail turning down the backlight but the overall improvement in contrast and colour easily makes up for it. 3d movies tend to be bright and colourful for the most part anyway which makes up the majority of my vr movie watching for the time being so it's a no brainer.

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

Yes there is a slight loss of black detail turning down the backlight but the overall improvement in contrast and colour easily makes up for it. 3d movies tend to be bright and colourful for the most part anyway which makes up the majority of my vr movie watching for the time being so it's a no brainer.

I would have upgraded to the Quest 2 if it wasn't for the lcd lenses but I'm glad that you are getting on well with it. I just couldn't take black turning into a washed out dark grey. I think maybe if I hadn't started with the Quest I might have been OK with the Vive Pro 2?

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

Yes there is a slight loss of black detail turning down the backlight but the overall improvement in contrast and colour easily makes up for it. 3d movies tend to be bright and colourful for the most part anyway which makes up the majority of my vr movie watching for the time being so it's a no brainer.

I've moved away from Link Wireless to Link cable. When watching a 2+ hour movie I needed to use the charging cable anyway. So why not use the USB-c cable to both charge and get a more stable Link connection and with the higher bandwidth get a slightly improved picture.

[RefractiveIndex]

Originally Posted by cdx47

I've moved away from Link Wireless to Link cable. When watching a 2+ hour movie I needed to use the charging cable anyway. So why not use the USB-c cable to both charge and get a more stable Link connection and with the higher bandwidth get a slightly improved picture.

Yes, I've been using the link cable as well. I should have mentioned that, it makes a significant difference compared to wireless on my set-up. Perhaps if I had a better router setup wireless would be a better choice to avoid the colour banding which occurs due to the usb encoding. But perhaps that's a Quest 2 issue.

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

Yes, I've been using the link cable as well. I should have mentioned that, it makes a significant difference compared to wireless on my set-up. Perhaps if I had a better router setup wireless would be a better choice to avoid the colour banding which occurs due to the usb encoding. But perhaps that's a Quest 2 issue.

The same color banding issue occurs on wireless so it's more likely to be a limitation with the Quest lenses and processing. The same picture has no banding on my TV. OLED TVs apparently have the same issue and it has to be dealt with by software. It's annoying and I've spent a lot of time trying to reduce it because on Virtual Desktop it's even worse. I thought I had reduced it significantly at one point but it seems to have returned which is weird. Link is still better than VD for color banding but it's still not great.

[cdx47]

OK I knew I had reduced banding before. I now realize that it was with VD using x265. But what didn't occur to me is that VD measures the amount of available bandwidth. Now I'm using a cable and with x265 the banding is reduced, aliasing is gone and the picture is a lot clearer reducing the SDE effect to a minimum. With Madvr big blocks of banding have been reduced even further.

[cdx47]

I've made a couple more changes to my setup and unless maybe mini LED comes along with almost no SDE and very similar contrast ratio, there's no longer a reason for me to upgrade. I'm glad I sent back the Vive Pro 2 because I don't think it could improve on this.

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

Upscaling to 4k solves this issue if your PC has the horsepower to do it.

I never really lost any detail but now that I've got the extra bandwidth between the HMD and computer, I've gone back to using 1080p per eye upscaled to 4K. When I did this before there wasn't much difference between HD and 4K, plus the GPU fan noise was very annoying. This time there is a noticeable difference with 4K and I have modified all the fan curves to keep my little box relatively cool and much less noisy

[RefractiveIndex]

Originally Posted by cdx47

OK I knew I had reduced banding before. I now realize that it was with VD using x265. But what didn't occur to me is that VD measures the amount of available bandwidth. Now I'm using a cable and with x265 the banding is reduced, aliasing is gone and the picture is a lot clearer reducing the SDE effect to a minimum. With Madvr big blocks of banding have been reduced even further.

How do you use a cable and x265?

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

How do you use a cable and x265?

Virtual Desktop.

[RefractiveIndex]

Originally Posted by cdx47

Virtual Desktop.

I'm using the Steam version of virtual desktop when I use the cable and not sure how to use x265.

[cdx47]

Originally Posted by RefractiveIndex

I'm using the Steam version of virtual desktop when I use the cable and not sure how to use x265.

Oh ok, funny how we take certain things for granted.. I also have the Quest version. I use that, not Link to connect to the PC. Then I run the Stream version from there. Inside the Quest app there are options for bandwidth, codec, and other tweaks.