Specifically this one (Czech site):
https://www.alza.cz/EN/gaming/pimax-4k-pc-vr-nolo-driver-d5323998.htm?o=1
Translated price = ~$417, I don't know if that sounds expensive to you US guys or not

I bought it for these reasons
I hear Elite is sublime in VR.
It's the only solution of quality that supports Windows 7.
It apparently has the best visual display of all the comparable models.
I have an older systems so I didn't feel like laying out more money until I have a much better system.

Setting up: is a nightmare so far. First of all - the headset works perfectly, and works perfectly in Elite, so that's a bonus and the main use-case achieved.
Second, the associated Nolo tracking device just isn't working for me. I have tech support all over it and I'm optimistic it will be solved, but until then I can't use regular VR games that require 6DoF tracking and hand controllers. Latest info is the firmaware requires a fix/update.

In Elite: great, pretty much what I was hoping for. The internal headset gyros are superb and give me pretty much perfect rotational tracking ingame, Obviously no translational tracking yet, but that's by-the-by, not essential.
Once I'd set my interoccular setting to be appropriate I found myself, in a weird way, in my cockpit in a totally convincing way. The sense of solidity and space is totally convincing. All the text is perfectly readable (thanks to Pimax's superior displays) and there's no lag or stuttering. As I said I have an older system so I can only assume that Elite is technically simple on the hardware, I'm not in a jungle fighting 100 Viet-cong, outer space is mostly empty

I am lucky in that I don't suffer from any kind of motion sickness, so rampaging around in the SRV is OK for me. Very fun in fact. In ship, when I do planetary takeoffs & incline to 90 degrees I get a very satisfying headspin effect, as well as when I roll my ship fast then stop. I don't think this counts as motion sickness, but is exactly what I would expect to feel in any case, so it's good. I never got that using TrackIR + monitor.

It's not a perfect solution, you do lose some visual clarity when compared to a good monitor, but IMO the benefits make up for it. The benefits being good cockpit & huge increase of immersion.

There is no screendoor effect that I can complain about, a combination of high res displays and supersampling makes it very smooth. The included & attached headphones are very good, Elite has superb sound design and the headphones convey them excellently. The fit is reasonably comfortable, but I guess the ridge of my nose is slightly high so I need to pad the facemask a little to relieve that for long sessions, but I have an alternative Pimax 4k facemask cushion on order that looks like it will be better.

Cons:
The galaxy map is a massive PITA. Really,
The system map is slightly better, but still a PITA.
I had to disable the look activation of the side UI panels, me gawping everywhere set them off all the time and interfered with my play. So I now activate them manually.
I do miss my scaled headmovement from TrackIR, so now when I want to look 90 degrees up or across, I need to actually turn 90 degrees no way around this, that's what VR is. It would be horrible to have scaled movement.
Taking short breaks is no longer as simple as taking off my headphones & TrackIR hat and visiting websites is no longer as simple as alt-tab however I always knew this would be the case so whatever. The game mirrors on the monitor so I can still keep an eye on it.
Using keyboard is slightly problematic, however I have attached small tactile feedback pads to the keyboard, so I run my thumb along the keyboard front, when I reach the pad, I know where the rest of my fingers are.

I've not used it myself, but it seems that folks that have, rave about it in Elite. Enjoy!

I imagine that most of the issues will be worked out after a bit of time.

VR is a game changer in Elite for sure. While I’d like to see it a bit sharper (the analogy I have is that it’s like watching an SD tv program on an HD set).

The Pimax is supposed to have decent picture quality but is buggy, I guess your getting some of that. The price you paid seems to be in the right ballpark, I paid a little less for the Rift, but it was on sale. I’ve also got the touch controllers. For Elite, you can use an XBox controller for stuff like the FSS scanner and the Galaxy Map. Once I took the time to map the galaxy map to my touch controllers it got MUCH easier to use. Truthfully, though, I usually just type in the system I want to go to, so I don’t have to navigate around the map too much that’s what I did before Vr too. I have my keyboard right between my stick and throttle so I can just feel it and touch type the system name. The oculus software allows me to jump out of the game and pull up a virtual desktop if I need to look anything up via EDDB or Inara, so I’ll do that either in station or in a long super cruise. I can also pull any app window out and pin it so I can see it in game. I’ll stick a browser window with info I want behind me so I can turn around and look at it when I need to.

The vr immersion is amazing. I agree about feeling like you are IN the cockpit. It’s cool to look around and see how big it really is. I’m kinda jealous the the SRV doesn’t bother you at all, I can get queasy any time I try to land on planet. The SRV is ok for a bit then it’s not. Hopefully I’ll get used to it so it doesn’t bother me.

Funny, I don’t miss my TrackIR at all I hated having to look forward when turning my head all the time!

I turned off the look activation for the panels for a little bit but found it too inconvenient. The workaround I came up with is to open the role panel via hot key. When you open a panel with a hot key, you have to close it with a hot key too, and while it is open the look activation is disabled. The role panel sits out of the way, so having it open doesn’t intrude in any way. When I want the look active again I just close the role panel.

Check out EDProfiler, it’s a tool for setting options in the game. You can get it on the ED forum (which is currently down now so i can’t link it -sorry!)

Thx for the info JC. I'm enjoying it hugely right now, to the detriment of anything useful in fact. Just pootling about and enjoying it.

I got the NOLO tracking working eventually, it was a device failure so I had to get it replaced, so now I have translational tracking with hand controllers, Skyrim VR was my next purchase

But to be honest I don't require it in Elite. I'm happiest with no translational tracking and "stuck" in my avatar's head position. It was mildly interesting to walk around my cockpit for a while, but sometimes I like my chair close to the rudders and sometimes a little further, and I dislike the re-positioning this causes. I'm either sometimes staring at the back of my cockpit chair or sometimes craning my head forward over my legs, depending on how I center it.

I also tried some HUD recolouring as per another thread here, but I didn't really get on with any of them and found the colour changes confusing. As I don't really mind the default colouring I just reverted it.

DM, maybe give this a go and see what you come up with. If you like the one I posted in the intervention thread I can give you the matrix values, although I think they are the same that Wingy posted

Here's the editor

http://arkku.com/elite/hud_editor/

My mission is to eradicate all Orange HUDs! Down with Orange! Orange HUD bad

Here's the matrix for Wingy's HUD (can be seen first post in My Home system thread)

Red > 0, 0.15, 1
Green > 0, 1, 0.87
Blue > 1, 0.46, 0.24

I am mostly certain I entered the same, but got this, which I like a lot. Please note HUD colors change everything, and your reds for example may be something different afterwards, which can take some getting used to

Hmm, first thing I did there DB was change the orange to yellow:
Red > 1, 1, 0
Green > 0, 1, 0
Blue > 0, 0, 1

And it looks pretty good to my eyes already. Yellow & blue make a nice contrast against each other. Thanks for the link

Awesome, glad it helped. I think we have an idea for a new thread

Yep

IRL I naturally go for muted, "swampy" desaturated colours, but in the case of the HUD I don't think subtlety is helpful, I need to see the info quickly. Some of the matrix combos I tried made targeting difficult for example, mixing up known friendly with other types, or just making some types very, very difficult to discern such that I couldn't even tell that I was pointing at something half the time.

You can re-center the headset, I think by default it is mapped to F12. Not a big fan of the any of the colors I've seen, more to the point I don't like how changing the HUD color changes all the other colors in the cockpit. I'd like to be able to change just the orange parts and let the rest (ie avatars, radar, etc) stay the same, but that's not the way it's implemented.

Sorry DB, I'm sticking with the orange!

There's always one! No worries JC, I run a tolerant eradication campaign

You will eventually be assimilated in to err something else. OK, the opposite of assimilated, but it's inevitable!

Resistance is NOT futile!!

Yeah I'll probably stick with default too I'll probably try the yellow theme I "invented" but I won't go beyond changing that much probably. I'm not very good at rewiring my colour associations

Regarding the headset, I was playing around in the SRV on some moon, I found a little area that looked like it might make a good motorcross play area and I was driving up the steepest inclines, and driving down them. Like almost 90 degree inclines. When I did this the first times, it probably represented the most "extreme" VR experience so far, my head was spinning, my stomach flipped, and my heart pounded. I never had this much response from a video game before. Money paid is worth it just for this IMO.

I also get a kick out of asteroid belts/rings, pragmatically IRL we can't see in 3D beyond about 200m or so, the parallax between two eyes 7cm apart doesn't really register. I see this effect in Elite VR also, when I get to within say 100-150m or so I get the sense that the huge ice rock is looming out of the background at me.

I can feel with anybody that has problems with the total color scheme changes - I tried a fair share of them, but at one point or another they fail for me as well (ship indicators friend/foe, galaxy map, ...). Still not a friend of the original orange, with a fair share of experimentation I found a for me acceptable washed-out view instead, closer to a "skin" tone than the dreaded orange.
Example and comparison to original here.

Now that's not too bad - would mind sharing your matrix? I wouldn't mind trying that out.

Meh. So I took the headset back

(The Czech Republic consumer laws allows that people can take stuff back for a refund up to 14 days after purchase, no questions asked.)

My two week adventure with VR is over, maybe next year when I build a newer, more powerful modern machine. The headset itself was OK, tracked rotationally pretty much perfectly, but I never could get the positional tracking NOLO stuff working. NOLO is the extra devices that are supposed to add in room tracking for headsets, consists of a base station (just one), two hand controllers and a head tracker.

My first NOLO product was faulty so I had to get that replaced, as the headset & NOLO came as a bundle, I also had to replace the headset :/

The NOLO solution was buggy and rather glitchy. By glitchy I mean the controllers sometimes popped to different orientations & slightly different positions. As there is only one base station I'm limited to 180 degree use not 360.
By buggy I mean that the hand controllers are supposed to switch off after 5 minutes on non-use, but they switched off regardless of what I was doing at the time, Google Earth VR, Skyrim VR etc. Not fun.
The fix for that is to install dedicated developer firmware that disables this, but updating firmware can only be done on Windows 10 machines, trying it on W7 will brick the devices. Oh, and a NOLO technician has to do it over Teamview :/ As the very reason for me buying this was to use it under W7 my only option was to update this at work, and as I work for a military training development company I'm pretty sure giving some random Chinese software company Teamview access to my PC would be frowned upon

So, back it goes unfortunately. Got all my money back + the various Steam VR games that I had bought under the Steam refund policy. I kept the small indie ones though, they were cheap & they need the money

So, back to TrackIR. My trusty old steed. First thing I notice when I boot up Elite on my monitor - oh my God it's so sharp and CRISP where did all this fps come from? I just wish TrackIR implementation in ED was full 6DoF, no real reason why it couldn't be, it's just not.

That's interesting, thanks for that.

Nice return policy. Is that the only headset you've used? I wonder if your experience would be significantly different with another brand?

Track IR does just fine anyway.

Yep it takes the anxiety out of large purchases that you're not that sure about


I've tried the Vive (at a friend's house) and while I remember the visuals to be OK, the tracking of the headset & controllers was spot-on. I have a much better idea on what I think tracking should be now. Of course, the main reason I went with this solution in the first place was because it boasted Windows 7 support. All the others require Windows 10.

So, with my plan of building a new machine in the early part of next year, I'll probably be looking at augmenting that with a decent VR setup too. Hopefully there'll be a solution that has the decent outside-in tracking plus a great display resolution. I'd be reluctant to go for a display lesser than the Pimax 4k I just tried, it was pretty good.


Yes it does. It's been a gaming staple for me for many years now, one of the absolute gaming essentials IMO. If it ever broke, I'd replace it immediately. I think my happiest experience with it is in Arma.

HP Reverb is a new unit that is supposed to have really high resolution. It isn’t out yet, but IIRC it is a WMR unit. Not sure about the quality of the controllers or tracking though. Valve is supposed to be announcing their entry into the market, called the Index, but no info on it yet.