HP Reverb VR Headset Review

 everybody's norm from Testim it's Jeremyfrom Testim welcome back to projections where this week we're gonna be reviewingthe HP reverb windows mix reality headset that's still thing but windowsmix reality yeah yes it is and it was a thing that was introduced a couple yearsago a lot of developers came out with Windows materiality had said these arethe first guys to make an iteration on that to do a second pass at it and theyreally feels like a second generation in terms of the headset yes it is rightthat's right so the first generation of Windows mixreality WM are headsets were really boilerplate meaning thatthey shared a lot of silver characteristics with each other theyalmost all had aside from the Samsung Odyssey a 1440 by 1440 panel they alluse the same inside out tracking system that Microsoft developed they almost allhave the exact same controllers which this one has as well and since thenwe've seen interations Samsung did Odyssey plus the trip inannouncements but not yet releases of just a slightly different form factors but ncc full form

 HP has really gone and at least on the display side done their own thinghere ya know they have upped the resolution per eye from 1440 to 2160 by2160 per eye yes this is a massive resolution bumpover top of not just the Windows machine reality headsets that came before it butanybody else doing VR headsets currently not not even the first gen we're talkingabout the headsets being released this year yeah over on the oculus side therift s which we reviewed has a single panel LCD 2560 by 1440 and then on thevalve side with the index coming out later this year that has the sameresolution but was a different type of display as like the vive pro or thequestion as de quest 1600 by 1440 as well which having usedyou know some of those like the quest and the vive pro those are those weremarket improvements over a first-gen we were really curious what it would belike to put on something with not only this high resolution but that highresolution concentrated into the same field of view right and because we'veseen the PI max we have try to take a high resolution and you know spread itacross your field of view which is great for giving you peripheral VR you knowview but you do spend pixels yes and the pixels you know per inch decreases yeahand I guess the result I mean the the bottom line having used this in avariety of games and different experiences and looking at text andcockpits is that it is a huge improvement the resolutionbump that this headset presents is its crowning achievement I mean that is whyyou would buy this headset every other aspect of this headset is inherited fromfirst gen Windows mixed reality the inside out tracking yes two cameras init performs just as well as it ever did but that also means it only performsjust as well as it ever did right the controller's standard Windows mixedreality controllers which are not our favorite controllers they're not goodI'm just gonna go out and say it they are not good there they they track justfine but the button placement theresponsiveness the weight everything about it the way they map on to thesoftware was unhappy with with this and even playing the same exact games usingthe touch controller the vibe controller and this controller this is by far theleast pleasant to use right so we're in a strange position of wanting to raveabout the resolution but having to say that the headset truly is hampered bythe things that it's inherited from version 1 to Windows mix reality but tothe good points yes we stepped into rec room for instance and suddenly I meanhonestly you step into any game that you're used to playing with thetraditional


VR headset any other VR headset and suddenly it feels likeyou've turned on 3d acceleration I mean it really made me feel like those earlydays when I first got like a 3d effects card in my computer right you went fromsoftware jaggies that yeah it's a smooth line and suddenly you're seeing all theassets as the designers designed them or maybe even not the way they neverintended those assets to be seen certainly beyond what they were able tosee in VR when they developed them yeah I think that there's a certain aspect ofthat where these games that are out there are designed for currentresolutions and they can hide some imperfections behind low resolution likegames used to do all the time I think rec room is a great examplebecause on its face rec room is it a game that you would think needs ahigh-resolution display or Tamil very flat shaded graphics you know low polygraphics very simple simple design but even on a game like of that putting onthe reverb and I think you felt this as wellyeah not only was all the detail sharper by felt like I could see further wetested that yeah you absolutely could see farther you sure and I all stood ina line and we tried to read a sign in the distance and honestly you could readit almost twice as far away as we could write it and of course that variesdepending on how big that text is but there's a simple test you can do if youhave rec room like in the lobby there was a bulletin board with pictures of asocial media Instagram posts right and they have in text the type of the nameof the person we like you said stood in a line and consistently it was furtherback 1.5 to almost twice as for that further back where we can make out thelegibility of that text but even just geometry you know playing a quest in arec room I felt like I could aim further I could resolve enemies in the distancelandscape in the distance further even though the game was rendering the sameassets just at a higher resolution right and I think unlike those early days ofblank way courtroom Raider like the assets actually are higher res and youare truly revealing more to appreciate about all of those textures in geometryI I really like that aspect of this headset I didn't I felt more immersed Ifelt like I was you know it's hard to to describe a higher level of immersion butthat is how I ended up feeling and I didn't feel like my eyes strained in agame carpet game elite dangerous for example where there is a lot of textyeah and play it not in VR I could play in VR in VR you know with dk 180k to bigjump to the



cv1 and the vibe even bigger Chum and i know a lot of people enjoythat game on those headsets and yeah and the text is legible on those headsetsbut with this it became a non-issue it comfortable yeah it became being in thatcockpit because the menu system where you glanceat parts of the UI and things pop up I didn't have this straight I didn't haveto like stress my eyes things just felt readable same thing with some X basedpirate trainer you know enemies further off in distance I felt like I could getnumb now right now that's not to say that there's no screen door effect orthat everything is perfect right like you know Michael Abrash has talked athis his keynotes about his dream state would be at a 4k by 4k which is nottwice the pixels four times the pixels better right so that makes me wonderwhat what that could even look like but this is a point where the the thejaggies of the the aliasing is so much of a non-issue I'm ready to get used tothis being a new standard which isn't a standard this is the resolution that Ithink we all want like going to the next generation of the arts what we couldlove to see from the index or from a nuke rift but you need the computer topush it so we're both I think you were running at 80 I have money at 1080 yesso was I straight 1080 not a TI but still pre sweet graphics card and in orin steam you have to bump up the render resolution to 175 percent in order topump out the number of pixels that this can display and that really bogs downeven a 1080 so I mean we were playing rec room but I was getting someframerate drops here and there on occasion it would be a pretty dramaticframerate drop and you would notice these various systems are trying tocompensate yeah like all the this time warp space warp stuff that was trying tofill in and reproject and that was definitely way more nor small enoughthankfully this does work with steam and steam there is a very easy spider tohave granular control over the render resolution I'll tell you exactly whatpixel by pixel it's trying to render at and at 100% which is the nativeresolution of the vibe it was okay it's it's like it feels like you get a littlebit of dithering I played it now I wanted stick to you know nativeresolutions and 174 175 percent you toned it down a little bit to 150 inorder to keep my framerate maxed out yeah and then I also tried the headseton a 1070 on a mobile 1070 laptop which runs great on all the other headsetsand that I did have to tone down to 125 percent now it is a single display portand USB 3 cable just like the rift us and that plugs into the back and justdetachable it's a proprietary plug in the back here so don't lose that cablebut it's really super easy to put on and to set up in that way I gotta say oculusnow has the crown for ease of setup even against Windows mixed reality becauseyou're still walking this around as you did with wmr version 1 you take theheadset and you walk around your play space and I always get weird geometrythat way because I it tells me to stand in the center first etc but the headsetitself very light I think we clocked it around 500 grams 510 grams whichtechnically heavier than the rift at 470 grams lighter than the ripped asslighter than the Quail very very manageable weight and it has integratedover the ear headphones and actually a lot of people have commented that itlooks a lot like a rift it does economically it has the same type ofstretchy attachment system almost like rigid back hard bridge of plastic backlike the baseball cap system is what we kind of refer to that as in the backeven though there is built-in audio you can plug in a third-party audio if youwant and of course


 it has microphone the bottom which for us we found oh yeah wasone of the better microphones you know jumping on discord ship and Skype itsounded really clear I'm coming out of this headset yeah we didn't expect thatand then we were on discord with kasher and both of us were like wow what areyou using your headset for your microphone this I don't even knowwhere's the microphones but the whole it just looks very standard yeah but theydid a really good job with whatever that microphone is right there is a versionof pass-through now for Windows mixed reality and it's not a traditionalpastor QC with the riff or even with the vibe it's a flashlight system it's whereyou point the controller has a window that gets you a monochromatic view ofthe outside world you can't use that for setup it's just a comfort option inorder to see your world it's a neat effect and it's probably better thannothing you know it's any camera that has aninside out ability needs to employ that just tokeep people comfortable and able to maintain contact with the real worldcan we talk about the controllers eye one more thing or two more things withthe display also when we interviewed HP's park manager about this they didadmit that to get these panels a lot of VR headset makers are designing theirheadsets around the type of panel as they find in in building heads aroundthat they found that they love the pixel density of these 2 2 K panels 2160 by2160 but they are actually smaller physical panels than what you'd find ona rift or other headsets which means that there's less stereo overlap andthat was something I was acknowledged us and we wondered would that be an issueright using this having less tear overlap between left and right eye andalso there is no hardware IP adjustment right it was almost a non-factor for meI noticed it but it was also it didn't affect my enjoyment it didn't affect theimmersion level it's the kind of thing that you forget about after a minute inthe device yeah and you might notice if you then switch back to another devicelike the quest of the riff to revive you'll notice that the stereo overlapand that is to say like how much of this circle overlaps with this one and it'sit's fairly complete on those other devices whereas this one they do appearto be spread a little bit further apart a big deal also just the amount of sweetspot for the lenses because the field of view is about the same as the old featof views you know it's you're looking through your snow hole is again yeahit's low I found to be relatively low sweet spot where if I drift my eyes mypupils away from the center very quickly the sharpness would go away yeah Iwonder how much of that is a factor of the high resolution resolving in thecenter of that of that display which is what that's where all the benefit is butthat's true of every VR headset right like you look through a rift to reviveor anything else and you're gonna see like the the crisp the as Christmases itcan be in the center right but they're lower resolution of those headsets isquite dramatically lower than this one so it's going to be even sharper here soI wonder


 if the mere fact that those other displays are lower resolutionmeans that we don't notice the degradation of sweet spot beyond thecenter of those lenses whereas you reallysee it here yes and of course there is no eye tracking so if you're just usedto not glancing yeah used to moving her head around which you would do onnothing likely dangerous you imagine the UI this would benefit so much from foe vnetted rendering this is the ideal kind of headset for that because again fovearendering only makes sense yeah if you have a sweet spot that's big wellbecause if your sweet spot isn't big that doesn't matter you're gonna not getas much clarity near the edges of the frame anyway I think that this headsetwould benefit from fovea to render tremendously just in as much as youwouldn't have to buy the 2080 you know graphics card right or something youknow and turn credibly powerful just to power it this is room for optimizationterms I'm just optimizing for that sweet spot in the rendering it also does thething we like in terms of it being easy to adjustment and it's hilt up-and-downso getting your head to that spot is really good and then I also want toaddress the the discussion people have found online with the idea of mirrorwhich we haven't really talked about before the show but it's a it's aquality of the display and the lenses where you can be best to drive it'smaybe like a dirty window pane effect and it is something I noticed in thisheadset when I I went for mode it's noticeably when you have bright lightlights if you look at a white spot it does you get this muddy lens look notenough that it would take away from the game and once I'm focus on the content Idon't want to pick it up but if you're just standing around and you pull youreyes to a white light colored spot on the in the in the experience you willnotice that it's not a nice even image quality is that a factor of thecurvature of the lenses I think it's a panel I think it's a perfect yeah yeahthere's a lot of speculation about whether HP is acknowledge this orwhether they don't be there's something up there trying to fix people havealready pointed out as of this week that some of the pre-orders for the reverbwere held back we reached out to HP and they said that it was due to demand andit would be resuming this week tells us that's not an acknowledgment or that'snot to resolve what people consider it to be panel display issues I thinkthat's just this is just the quality of that panel this is the one they pickedand there's trade off for that resolutionand another trade-off is definitely black levels no now this isn't this isan LCD panel it's not an OLED panel so that's out of the gate you know you'regonna be dealing with black levels that are not pure black however the otherguys who are also doing LCD oculus and on the new roof test and in the indexfrom valve those black levels are blacker than this little riff des yeah Imean because a



lot of people were concerned about that they asked us tostep into space games when we were testing out the product and make surethat the black levels you know we're deep enough to create that immersionlevel and personally I think that they are on the roof desk I have not triedthe index you have but with this they are quite a bit brighter like and youcan see that very clearly because the black if you're playing elite dangerousfor instance the black of space next to the matte of the the you know theheadset that you're looking through is quite a bit brighter and so I would saynot just the black levels but the overall contrast of this headset thebrighter levels compared to the the darker levels is not that rich I mean itis really all about that resolution right right I thought that very nice wayit wasn't as bright as I wanted a panel going from ref des to this roof des lookbrighter not only was that the black levels better on that yeah but that thenadds to what you're talking about it being a lower contrast here andespecially we talking about a field of view that isn't that big alreadyaccentuates the tunnel vision right because you have that black to compareit to yeah alright let's talk about the controller's all right we just wish thatthese weren't the controllers they ship with no I mean it it is possible to playWindows mixed reality games on a witness maturity headset using steam controllersyes and that's a zing but I feel like that's not even fair to talk aboutbecause who's you would need a steam VR headset to do that don't you because thethe steamvr controllers need to still be piped through the receiver that's in avive horn index I mean the only people for that are in position of maybepre-ordering an index versus paying $600 for all right the HP Reaver upgradingfrom the original vibe they have their lighthouses set uphave the steam they like the vibe what controller is the wands whatever youwant to call them and does require a little bit of hacking into it using someopen input the our input stuff it works you align the controllers kind of mapyour rear play spaces to be the same and yes it technically works that is a bigworker and it is expensive yes totally and there is no way to pair this - mixedreality with the oculus platform at all many Noas of yet the thing that makes the more sense is essentially looking at this asa dedicated headset where you wouldn't be using traditional head trackcontrollers well let's talk about what's bad about these like for whatever reasonwe couldn't even play the one of the rec room quests because when you go to throwsomething with these controllers it's about 90 degrees off things go straightdown and I get it that there's a sense of momentum that they're trying tomeasure but and maybe it's on the rec room guys to you know design aroundthese controllers or include support for them but they're supposed to have nativecompatibility with rift and with vive controllers and these the buttons


andeverything is mapped now there's no a and B buttons or X&Y on this so it Mapsthe touchpad in sort of a the same way that the the vive ones but there is ananalog stick now unfortunately the button beneath theanalog stick takes you into the windows with a true button so it's a Windowsbutton which is like the home button it opens a reality interface and then whichalso oddly closes the app that you're using Oh like for you for me twice I hitthat button accidentally and it just shut my game off right because you'reworking layers and layers of apps right you have on the base level Windows mixedreality when just needs launch and run and always be accessible to controllerson top of that you're running steamvr yeah which that's the own menu systemthat you can access by hitting the the center yeah you got for us to joystickin yep and then you have whatever menu for whatever game and experience you'rein so it's clunky it's definitely going it like it just doesn't feel right andafter an hour of using this my hands just felt cramped there these are allthese are not organ on eclis well-designed like they you know they'rebasically what you would design is a fur generation this says so little in commonwith the even the Xbox gamepad from the same company which is like king ofergonomics in terms of like game pads yep and this is nothing in common withthe touch controllers which we think of as like a really high bar right now andthe the new index controllers look very interesting as well this is really feelslike last previous generation I mean and that goes to the question of how wellsupported the whole Windows mixed reality platform is today you knowMicrosoft put a big effort seated all these hardware manufacturers with specswith controllers with these this boilerplate design for an ecosystem forVR including building this front-end and then since then they've really donenothing with it they're they kind of refocus those efforts to hololenshololens - you know whatever a version of Windowsruns on that light version of Windows and I would be I wouldn't be surprisedif you know they give up on Windows XP in terms of the VR side but I really I'mholding out and hoping that maybe there's a team in there working onsomething and maybe there they are they trust their inside out tracking andmaybe the second gen controller is way better and they'll be backwardcompatible right that's not out of the realm of possibility and that'ssomething that you can't Bank on paying $600 for a headset today so it's justunfortunately that is that's a reality right so who is this headset for thenit's for somebody who needs that resolution that we keep coming back toif I think it would be pretty great for gamers who have their own control set upfor a specific kind of gaming driving games for instance


well people havetheir own you know little cockpit that they can sit in and grab a wheel ifyou're not using these and you want to use a HOTAS for instance personallydangerous you want those added pixels to at this despite the black levels thiswould be great for that I mean the I can't emphasize enough what a jump it isin the clarity yeah when you have that resolution in the optimal setting reallylike going from headset headset headset nothing has surprised me as much as aconsumer product as this and maybe want to build out a whole throttle and hotelsystem just a plainly dangerous just to take advantage of this because it reallyfeels like a we're panels maybe going yeah the onlyother headset that's approached this for me and and surpassed it to be honestwith you is the Vario headset which is a commercial you know and our businessenterprise level device and that one the pixel density was only to a veryspecific yeah they had like a 5 pro everywhere but then in the center theyuse these 1080p displays that are really really small and they give you this sortof fixed fo B ated experience where the center is like reality and it looksamazing however it's like thousands of dollarsfor this headset it is not a consumer device so under $1000 at $600 like thisresolution is a very sweet taste of the future yeah it is available for ordernow they haven't as of when we're filmed this started shipping them but accordingto HP that will start again this week so that's what we got for the HP reverb onemore thing before we go yeah both of us got to try a new VR experience this weekwe unfortunately don't have footage of this because it's a VR escape room rightso we don't want to spoil it for you but we can tell you the general gist it'sdeveloped by Ubisoft it is set in the Assassin's Creed universe they actuallyhave two of these one that's been around for a year and another one that they'rejust rolling out now and it is they've developed it for locations to you knowput up themselves and charge an entry fee yes it is totally a licensing modelwhich is I think not gonna be a new thing going on like it's gonna be aregular thing we know companies of Serbia's and even the Arizona sunshinefolks have developed experiences because there's a whole business model oflicensing content to vr gaming centers to getting people into your room so wewent to a local escape room facility down in Santa Clara off off the couchthat had four rooms set up for VR people could pay to use VR right and they hadthis four player or two player hour-long escape room in Assassin's Creed which Ithought was very very interesting it was really well done in that you know thebest escape room experiences I've had have been ones with that requirecooperation yeah you don't want to go in there and have everybody spread out andsolve their own puzzles and come back the ones that I really like are wheneverybody has to hold a button down at the same time or create a chainreaction whether they're holding hands across the room conduct yeahconduct electricity this was in that vein like every single puzzle that thisthat the two escape rooms that I played presented required teamwork and I playedwith one other person but I could see how the world was set up for for rightit was just mirror they put you in almost teams of two in in paralleltracks have to complete these goals and one of the benefits of splittingdesigning this though people aren't actually in the same room is that theycan actually design rooms that are epic and scale right so the you areteleporting around you're creating an avatar you know for people who may benew to VR it's only one button control so we trigger control you're grabbingand teleporting way think about that they use one button for everything thereis a mode they said for more advanced users the the game master can't allowyou if you want to use touch controllers use a riff setup to grab and no teleportdifferently you mentioned the game master that's an important aspect toescape rooms it's usually somebody who comes in the room with you and stayssilent until they see that you need help and in this case it was someone on alaptop in another room that would launch the game make sure everyone wascommunicating properly yeah there's no one actually no avatar in VR doing thatno but I can listen to you everything that you say and they can type to you soif you do hit a snag you're always you know you got some help rightmechanically it's a lot of the sabic addicts we've seen in other


VR gamesthere's climbing there's bone era I've got it was surprised there was climbingbecause that's an intense experience like with if I put somebody into I haveput somebody into the climb and they have nope right out of that right assoon as they fall and maybe that's part of this right giving your users athrilling yeah your experience but what I loved was how they required thecooperation the aha moments came I realized it wasn't just one personscaling one climbing was combining that with another VR mechanic that anotherperson had to do right then he actually gets you to progress the level and thescope was wonderful you know you're climbing these caverns yes in statuesthey pushed VR in the right spots for to that end I mean they they did things youcould never afford to do you know traditional escape room and that's whatyou want from a VR experience the thing that I wanted in addition to a VRexperience were actual physical objects that I don't have at home like the thedownside of this thing was that you were really just of using an off-the-shelfvive pro you could imagine a scenario where if they didn't want to go throughthis Enterprise Solution of partnering with L bees that could have just soldthis and let people play at home and cooperate home right it wouldessentially be the same thing and then would I have paid $30 or $45 in order toplay through it once with my friend who also paid that amount yeah I don't thinkso so I think maybe the price might be a bit too high at least set off the couchthen I imagine Ubisoft let's location they take their own price yeahbut then again they're both most of their business is probably corporateteam-building exercises and it makes a lot of sense for that for people who noteveryone has we are and also for escape room junkies who just have gone to everylocal escape room and the last ones are these VR experiences I think if youapproach it from like okay I am going to an escape room I understand that therewas a lot of time and effort put into the specialized experience and eventhough its software it also took a lot of development hours then yes you couldsort of justify this cost I like the trajectory of what they'redoing with this the idea is that this studioUbisoft gonna start spitting up new experiences every 10 months or so andthe first one period one well it had your climbing and and other mechanicsthe mechanics there may introduce new mechanics but the idea is that they wantpeople to progress through get more comfortable in VR come back and thenchallenge them with more challenging puzzles right like more escape room typethings not about necessarily but dexterity but is about communication isabout cooperation and that's where other aha moments came in the guy who runsthis place off the couch he actually has one of the records for visiting the mostescape rooms in the world over 400 he said he's been Wow and I he was had hehad some great ideas himself that he was pitching it would be soft like why notcombine a traditional escape room with VR like at a certain point maybe itthe room and there's a headset that does nothing you enable it and then you putthe headset on and the virtual reality aspects affect the real world and viceversa some asymmetrical escape room where one person's in

VR another personis not in VR that's something you can't do at home and to me that's the realvalue of escape room since you're going to places to do things with friends andyou're having experienced like at a theme park that is impossible to have athome it goes back to the trade-offs right either very highly specializedexperiences or stuff that they can work with a lot of partners and make just thesoftware and assume all their different VR escape rooms around the world thatthey have these set up in will have the same set of parameters that's the trickypart right like as much as I want rumble floor and a switch to pool on the wallif they've required that no one's gonna have it no one would happen yeah sothat's available I think it 104 places with link to the website below we cansee if there's one near you it definitely is an interesting path for VRand of course we'll have more of those stories to tell them in the futurethanks for watching this time and we'll see you next time bye