As someone who has spent quite some time tuning their VR setup for iRacing, I highly recommend the Pimax headsets (Pimax 8K X has dual native 4K). Best resolution and FOV, decently priced, light software, and surprisingly great support.
I 3d printed some supports to mount a vive headstrap to it, and removed the vive headphones in favor of Airpods. 200 degrees of FOV @ 75hz would be incredible for work with a far superior viewport than OP.
Thank you for bringing up FOV. It frustrates me to no end that in nearly 5 years of VR advances, we're still stuck with a ~90 degree periscope angle of view for the vast majority of headsets.
Sigh. If you had read my comment you'd have seen the tilde, which indicates "approximate". I've used the vive with 110' , that is not a significant difference, particularly when you consider that the human eye has an fov of ~200 (notice the tilde)
Only 7 of the 21 VR listed in that page exceed 115 degrees. And four of those are PIMAX systems.
Just a caveat — the article is very Facebook-centric. All the software they mention seems to be Oculus-specific within that closed ecosystem. No mention of non-Oculus options.
There's no real avenue for a "dumb display" to work as a 6DoF headset, and even back in the DK1, 3DoF days you'd still end up needing some software (mainly drivers) for things like the gyroscope.
If I remember correctly, weren't the early ones at least more akin to this? I have a DK2 sitting in a box somewhere. Ordered it to mess around with and it was cheap enough that I could risk not getting a ton of use out of it.
I seem to remember that it was mostly done on the computer: IR emitters on the headset for tracking with a sensor/camera to receive the positional data to be processed by the computer. Then the generated output of the "camera" was sent to the display sitting behind the lenses.
There was definitely processing going on and you did need drivers/software. I'd imagine you could still use it with not much more than some lightweight drivers/software to process the positional data and render the appropriately distorted output.
I mean literally that the PiTool running in the background takes like 10mb of memory. I've seen a lot of reports from friends and online in the sim community that their beastly systems can barely pull 90fps steady in the G2/Oculus headsets, meanwhile I'm at almost double the FOV at 120hz steady, maxed, on a worse system.
We've tried everything we could to get their headsets to run smoothly. There are multiple guides in the iRacing forums about combing through every line in all relevant .ini files, setting up windows, nVidia settings, etc.
I haven't used one of those, but I can guess what he means based on owning an Oculus Rift 2. Let's say I want to start playing a Steam game with my headset. To do so, I must install the Oculus software, sign in with my Facebook account (it's a brick with a headstrap without an account), then find the setting that enables "non-Oculus software" to operate the Rift display. Using the Rift always starts the Oculus software. There are shortcuts on the headset that throw you into Oculus's own environment for buying and launching games.
I 3d printed some supports to mount a vive headstrap to it, and removed the vive headphones in favor of Airpods. 200 degrees of FOV @ 75hz would be incredible for work with a far superior viewport than OP.
This blog post makes me want to give this a try.