This incredibly tiny VR headset weighs a
fraction of the Valve Index, uses highresolution micro OLED displays, and
it ships with a face cushion that manufacturer Big Screen Inc. creates
specifically for you using a 3D scan of
your face. And the craziest part is that
it's not an enterprise product that costs $3500 upfront plus an annual
subscription like the Vario VR3. I mean, it's not cheap either, coming in at
around the cost of a PSVR2 and a Valve Index combined. [music] But on the other
hand, it's also the reason that I am finally excited to talk about PC VR
again. I have a lot of thoughts to share on this one, but the Big Screen Beyond
is a legitimately nextgen VR headset,
guys. So, don't tell me you're not here for it. The very first thing you'll
notice pulling the Beyond out of the box is how incredibly small and light it is.
[music] They advertise it as being 16th the weight of the Valve Index. And while
I think that's a little disingenuous given that the Index has excellent
headphones on board while the big screen requires you to uh be yo, I think it
ends up feeling true because of the difference in weight distribution. You
see, most modern headsets stick so far
out that they end up feeling less like a pair of goggles and more like a monitor
that's bolted to the front of your face. This this is something truly different.
And when you're moving around quickly, you don't feel that wobble, which almost
manifests as a as a delay while the headset tries to catch up to you. The
next thing you'll notice is the strap. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen,
but between the clunky adjustments, the way that the back resize is always
slipping for me, and this rear cable clip that gets torquked by the weight of
the tether cable, it is a real downer
compared to the headset itself. The good news is that my impressions of the face
cushion were the polar opposite. I have,
plainly speaking, never [music] used a piece of consumer electronics that felt
this bespoke. As part of the purchase process, you borrow a friend's iPhone
and you upload a scan that you take of your face. They then use that to 3D
print a oneofa-kind silicone style
cushion. Then they take that a step further and they mate that cushion with
a set of goggles that perfectly matches
your interpupilary distance or IPD. And
then you can take it even a step further and equip it with prescription lenses so
that you never have to worry about fitting glasses under your headset ever
again or sharing your VR headset ever
again. This forever alone design
philosophy ends up being one of the Beyond's biggest strengths. Uh the
cushion really is incredibly comfortable
and manages literally zero light bleed
[music] and apparently issuing adjustable IPD contributed to
significant weight savings. But it also
ends up being one of the headset's greatest weaknesses in that for anyone
with a family or even an
expensive investment will at best be
mildly uncomfortable for anyone but you who uses it. And that's even if you pony
up for additional face cushions once those become available. Then again, if
your layout children wanted to have a big screen beyond, they should have
thought about that before they didn't have jobs. Am I right? Yeah, it's out
later. Let's talk about the experience for you,
the alpha of the house. Having never
seen a micro OLED display before, I was
blown away immediately by multiple aspects of the Beyond's image quality.
Okay, first of all, of course, you get the incredible contrast of OLED with
blacks going from, you know, kind of gray in my Valve Index to actually
black. But what really got me here was
the finness of the image. I mean, 2560x
2560 doesn't sound like that much more than a PSVR2, but when you do the math,
it is over 50% more pixels. It looks way
better. But my screen door effect, like
for real, guys, this is the first headset that I've used that makes even
the high quality assets in a game like HalfLife Alex feel kind of cheap and low
res. It's kind of like when TV transitioned over to HD and we all went,
"H, special effects probably need to get a whole lot better, don't they?" The
panels aren't particularly bright. Big Screen quoted me about 80 nits at their
default 100% brightness, which is considerably less than the index and a
little over half of the Vive Pro, both of which are decidedly last gen products
at this point. But I got to confess that until I asked Big Screen about HDR
compatibility for watching movies and, you know, the grand cinema in VR, I had
no idea that the Beyond was so dim. In
fact, you can increase the brightness to
about 200 nits in their driver utility. But with zero light coming into the
headset, plus the reduced motion clarity that comes with a brighter display in
VR, I actually found that I preferred
the dimmer experience. Also, the Beyond's fan kicks into high gear to
protect the internal components and to keep the user's face from getting too
sweaty when you turn it up. Capturing that. Speaking of, time to get
sweaty here and actually fire up some games. Because of the bandwidth
limitations of DisplayPort 1.4, for the Beyond can run either at 75 Hz at its
native resolution using DSC or display
stream compression or it can run at 90
Hz at 1920 by 1920 using DSC once again,
but also using Big Screen's own lossier
compression that gets upscaled back to native once it passes through the
optical cable back to the headset. And this has been a significant source of
controversy in the leadup to the launch of this product. But [music] now that I
have it in my hands, I got to say, guys, I really do think the whole thing's been
kind of overblown. It is true there is a
difference in image clarity. And if I was planning to spend an extended amount
of time using a virtual desktop or watching movies, I would go to the
trouble of adjusting the refresh rate in the driver and rebooting [music] Steam
VR. But for games, I found that any
difference was more than made up for by the Beyond's drastically reduced motion
blur and edge fringing compared to LCD type displays. Now, Big Screen has their
own workound. They suggest manually setting render resolution to 3600 by
3600, so you're effectively using super sampling to overcome this. But they also
recommend an RTX 4080 or greater for
this technique. So bottom line, if a
future headset comes along that supports DisplayPort 2.0 and we don't need these
compression tricks, then I'm never going to say no to a visual fidelity boost.
But for now, that doesn't exist. And this trade-off is one that I would
happily make. Though even characterizing it as a trade-off feels a little unfair
to the Beyond. This is the kind of upgrade where every game you play feels
new and exciting again. Like for kicks, I fired up Ly's Tail, which as it turns
out is available on Steam now. I found myself once again marveling at the fun,
beautiful environments and just taking joy in the sheer immersiveness of the
experience. And I've already touched on HalfLife Alex a little bit, but to
expand on that, you're [music] still just a disembodied pair of hands, but it
felt less like being in the game and more like being Alex. Um, I found myself
getting distracted just looking at things and and marveling at the artwork
as though I was putting on prescription lenses for the first time in my life and
I could finally truly see it. One valid complaint I've seen about the Beyond
though is that its non-porous silicone type cushion can lead to some pretty
unpleasant experiences in workout games like BeatSaber [music] and Dance Dash.
For my part though, I found that the effect I'm going to call swamp eyes was
less noticeable when I was already kind of damp all over anyway and more
noticeable when I wasn't doing anything. For example, I was sitting on the couch
watching Encanto in the giant theater environment in big screens Steam app.
And as amazing as it looked with the 4K copy that I ripped from Blu-ray, by the
way, the all streaming future going to kind of suck for experiences like this.
After 20 minutes or so, I felt like I needed to air the headset out. Big
[music] screen apparently does have plans for a future cloth cushion, but
personally, I plan to stick with this one. Oh, did I mention yet that I'm
sticking with the Beyond? I am, but it actually wasn't as simple a decision as
I've made it sound like so far. The thing is, as much as I talk about
watching movies or playing Alex or whatever, the only thing I regularly do
in VR is play BeatSaber. And the difference between 90 Hz and the 144
hertz of the index is pretty significant at a high level of play. After some
longer sessions, however, I feel that the reduced motion blur is worth it
along with the better overall image quality. Another thing I do from time to
time though is stream. And I got to tell [music] you guys, whatever Valve did
with the onboard audio system on the Index [music] is the kind of science
that is so advanced that it is in disccernible from magic. Because these
near field speakers are perfect for listening to music. And the built-in
mics often get comments from viewers asking what the heck I'm using and why
my voice sounds so good. Thankfully, the mic on the Beyond seems to be made of
the same kind of magic. and if their upcoming audio strap is any good, that
should hopefully resolve both my issue with cable riding my headphones and my
issue with strap comfort. However, there's one more thing that cannot be
overcome with a future update, and it's this kind of lens flare effect that
blooms out of bright objects. As my understanding goes, this is a side
effect of the extraordinarily thin and light pancake lens assembly that Big
Screen is using. There are advantages like the aforementioned lightness and
thinness, but this blur flare is a major
and distracting drawback, at least when you're noticing it. Here's the thing,
though. I remember buying my first high-end display. It was a P95F plusb
CRT. It was 19 in and ran at 1600 x 1200
of 85 Hz glory. And I know what you guys
are thinking. Where you going with this old man? But please stick with me, okay?
My point is that monitor used a technology called aperture grill to
achieve a sharper image. And one of the complaints about aperture grill displays
was that you could actually see two fine
wires running across the screen where the horizontal damping wires were welded
to the vertical wires that make up the grill. [music]
They're pretty noticeable, and I was on the verge of returning mine until I
fired up one of my favorite games and promptly forgot that they were there.
Say I told you I was going somewhere with this. I wouldn't say that the blur
flares are as forgettable as my damping wires. In darker games like Beat Saber
or HalfLife Alex, they stopped bothering me altogether. But that wasn't the case
all the time. While playing Ly's Tail, for example, which is a bright game that
puts the user in a fixed position where they look around a lot. I was often
distracted by the perceived lower contrast in these flare areas or flare
areas as I've taken to calling them. [music] And I felt the same way using the Big
Screen Beyond as a virtual monitor. If I'm a man of culture and dark mode all
my things, honestly, it's all good. But
as soon as some bright notification or app pops up, it's like someone threw
Vaseline in my eyes and then shone a flashlight at me. I do appreciate a lot
of the transparency and product education that Big Screen does on their
product page, especially with respect to the compression that they're doing on
the image, but these blur flares are conspicuously absent from their
literature. And it's something that I think they should be meeting headon in
order to ensure that would be buyers understand why this design choice was
made. Because now that I do, I'm okay
with it. There's just so much to love
here. Um, for example, I really appreciate the fact that it's USB
powered rather than requiring a wall plug, it makes it so much easier to pack
it up and take it with you if you wanted to do that for whatever reason. And
while their no frills approach means no
frrills, you know, integrated processing for standalone operation like Quest, no
gaze tracking like the PSVR2, no. But
believe it or not, that's actually something I like about their design
philosophy. They did what they set out to do. Build a smaller, lighter, more
immersive VR headset. A true upgrade for people like me who already wired up
their living rooms with tracking base stations and don't want the compromises
of inside out tracking. It did result in some questionable choices, like for
example, the inability to pop out of VR
and talk to someone, like where am I where am I supposed to put this thing?
Um, and not to mention the inability to share your headset. Like I mentioned
before, your Beyond is yours and yours alone. But then, come to think of it,
that's probably fine given what I know you people are using this thing for. So,
why do you only have one wand? What do you think I'm doing with the other hand?
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if you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out my review of the Valve Index.
It's over four years old, but uh hey, so is the index. And somehow it has
remained relevant.