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Oculus Rift S quick review with DCS helicopters
Some of our Black Shark Den pilots, received on the 21st of May, their shiny new Oculus Rift S VR headset. Here are some first impressions from the first flights in DCS helicopters.
Features: The new Oculus Rift S main new features, compared to the first commercial version of the Oculus Rift, are an increased resolution (from 1,080 × 1,200 to 1,280 × 1,440), improved lenses with reduced reflections and wider sweet spot for your eyes, removal of the external positional sensors to rely only on a set of integrated cameras for the head tracking that reduces the amount of USB 3 connectors from 3 to 1. It features a new headband system and a new audio system. You will also need a DP video connector instead of an HDMI to support the new higher resolution at 80Hz. Oh, and did I mention that they managed to maintain a very reasonable price for this piece of equipment compared to the competition with a $399 tag (399 pounds in UK, 399 euros in EU).
Setup: The new headband is a real pleasure to set with only a rear knob to turn until your headset fits. Bad news for the ones with corrective lenses in the Oculus Rift. The new S will not fit those lenses. But there is a bit more room for people with glasses, although it is not ideal. Without the need to position anymore the external sensors, setting up the S is pretty straightforward. The security area can be setup through an augmented reality function where you can see through the cameras your real environment and literally draw the boundaries with your controllers. Same thing for setting up your height from the floor, you just need to push a virtual floor down to when you are actually touching the real one with your controllers. Talking about controllers, the new shape makes it easier to grab your flight controls (cyclic and collective) without having to drop or remove them. So much more intuitive than having to enter a height number in a field.
Flying with DCS helicopters: When it comes to VR, there is no better experience in DCS than flying a helicopter: flying below tree line sitting inside a plexiglass bubble provides an amazing immersion feeling and increases your situational awareness by an order of magnitude. The big critic I had with the first Oculus Rift was the poor definition of the screens and the screen door effect, making the gauges very hard to read and spotting enemies difficult. The new Oculus S screens basically remove this problem: the gauges now are crystal clear and you can read all the labels and see even the smallest graduations on your compass or HSI, making it possible to navigate and fly your aircraft with a very good accuracy. The cockpits in general look really crisp. A huge difference with the older Oculus Rift.
Two things that still need improvement though:
- the ABRIS on the KA50 is still extremely hard to read in moving map mode with the names of the villages or towns readable only if you virtually stick your nose against the ABRIS screen,
- the labels on the SA342 cockpits are still very difficult to read, the font used being too small even for the new definition.
Screen door effect is now pretty much invisible. Audio is horrible. You can forget about flying with the default Oculus Rift S audio system. So you can either use your audio headset over the VR one (heavy) or plug earphones into the audio jack available on the Oculus Rift S headset. In DCS and running on a 2080 Ti, with a pixel density of 1.8 and all textures set to high, frame rate was almost all the time maxed out at 40fps (80Hz). Not a visible difference with the 45fps of the previous Oculus. There was though some visible stuttering with the landscape when looking on the sides. Let's hope the VR optimization promised by ED in the soon to be released DCS 2.5.5 will solve that.
Conclusion: With such a price tag, the Rift S is an interesting upgrade for DCS Helicopter pilots: the increased resolution makes it much easier and nicer to fly a rotary wing. For those who did not use VR before, you can expect a significant increase of your flying skills with this device; the increased situation awareness allows to land in very tight landing zones that you would have avoided before for fear of clipping your rotor blades or breaking your tail rotor. You will still need to use your audio headset to stay immersed in the beautiful flapping sound of the Huey, or the enchanting music of the SA342 turbine, and I wish there was some key bind available in DCS to activate the external cameras view of the headset in order to be able to use the keyboard or activate some elements of a physical cockpit without having to remove the headset or rely on muscle memory. Finally, I am really waiting for the VR optimizations promised by ED in the 2.5.5 for the Caucasus, Persian Gulf and Normandy map.
