so if you didn’t know, i’m pretty big into vr. quite the enthusiast i’d say. i unfortunately don’t have like a big collection of vr shit for now but i am trying to save up and what i do have has really given me quite a positive experience with the technology. to give some context because i don’t talk about vr nearly enough here, i started off with the original vive in late 2021 as the main thing i was looking for in a headset was a cheap entry point into the steamvr ecosystem. i really enjoyed using it and believe that if you have no experience in vr it’s a really solid way to start if your main priority is the same as mine, especially now that you can find them for ridiculously cheap prices (in the UK often just over \u00a3150 for a full kit). when i decided that it was time for a new headset, i found a used vive pro for around \u00a3190 and a wireless adapter kit for around \u00a3150. my experience with that was equally as amazing. the same deep blacks and generally more vibrant colours i had come to expect when in vr, screen door effect noticeably reduced, and a headstrap that is so much better than anything htc made for the original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
a big downside of the vive though was of course the controllers. not for the reason you’d expect though surprisingly. at this point i had never experienced any controllers other than the wands, apart from using a friend’s quest 2 for a short amount of time. i really enjoyed using the touchpads (to the point that even today with the index controllers i make great use of theirs), and the click on the triggers felt great to me too. the problem i had with them funnily enough, was build quality. for as much as i loved the wands’ touchpads, they were built like shit and i had to buy 4 replacements over the time i was using them because of how often they would fail. this left me with a lot of wands sitting around doing nothing so i ended up following a guide online to convert 2 of them into trackers and stuck them onto an old pair of shoes. i was originally planning to buy a vive 3.0 tracker in order to get tracking of my hip\/waist for proper full body tracking but due to the fact that i had bought a link box and tether for my vive pro i no longer had any way to power the original vive to use it for its built in watchman dongles so instead i bought the gear vr lens mod (and looking back at it i’m happy i did because not long after that purchase the 3.0 vive tracker went on sale lol). it was about \u00a340 for the lens mod itself<\/a> and a handheld manual air blower<\/a> to blow out any dust that entered the headset when i took the lenses off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n fast forward a few days, everything arrived and i popped off the vive pro’s original lenses by pushing a small flat-head screwdriver in between the lens and the casing and then prying up. they got stored separately in plastic bags then i dusted the screens inside the headset and pushed in the new lenses. when i started up the headset and opened vrchat i was fairly amazed by how much cleaner things seemed now. the sweet spot felt much bigger, glare\/god rays were noticeably reduced, the rings you could see through the old lenses due to the way they’re made were no longer visible, and things were generally a lot less blurry. the screen door effect i do believe is a little more noticeable but i don’t really mind it, weirdly enough i’ve been known to quite like the look of the vive pro’s screen door effect in some cases. after testing i then put the headset away for a bit and went to do other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n later i put it back on and upon entering my vrchat home world i immediately noticed something was off. the world’s skybox distorted a lot when i moved my head and the main menu looked like it was bulging forward. in an attempt to fix this i shut down the headset and used the lighthouse console accessible in SteamVR’s program files to write the v14 config found here<\/a> to the headset. after doing that the skybox distortion became a lot less noticeable. it was definitely still there but not at all in an amount that annoyed me personally. now, the menu’s distortion. after a bit of searching i found out that adjusting my headset’s ipd should fix it, which it indeed did. a few weeks in i noticed what i thought was a set of stuck pixels in the bottom left of my vision in one eye. i paid no attention to it for that day while simultaneously worrying that the green screen that shows up in vr when your computer’s locked might have caused some pixels in my headset to go stuck. later on i thought that maybe it might have been some dust stuck in the headset so the next day i took that lens off and dusted the screen again. that fixed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n now that it’s been a month since i first installed the mod, i can say i quite like it. its not perfect at all, the lenses that were chosen for the original vive (and presumably by extension the vive pro because they seem to use the same ones) were chosen for a reason<\/a> and by installing this mod you will be introducing distortion to the optics of your headset, distortion that in the worst case could end in you becoming very motion sick without even realising it (to quote the comment i linked a little bit up above, “Most concerning is that swimmy HMDs cause nausea at an almost subconscious level, you don’t need to perceive it for it to make your experience using the HMD unpleasant.”). in my experience though i’ve felt none of that, even after the fixes i still notice distortion but for me personally it’s not at all an issue. people claim as well that by installing this mod you will lose a small amount of fov, i never noticed this either myself which could be to do with the fact that i use the original vive’s facial interface on the headset which does push my eyes closer to the lenses. my apologies if you just so happened to find this post while deciding whether or not to install the mod but your mileage will absolutely vary when installing it and i feel that’s a really important thing to let you know. for a bit more of a definitive answer on whether or not you should do it though, do consider it if you’ve been using vr for a good while, know that you have a good tolerance to anything that causes motion sickness in vr and don’t at all mind taking a risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" so if you didn’t know, i’m pretty big into vr. quite the enthusiast i’d say. i unfortunately don’t have like a big collection of vr shit for now but i am trying to save up and what i do have has really given me quite a positive experience with the technology. to give some context … <\/p>\n