Mobile Driving/Flying Cockpit with Motion and Tactile ( Build )

[RCHeliguy]

These earphone cords are very comfortable. I like them better than the stock cord. The loops that wrap around my ears are softer and are not putting any tension on the earphones. With the Comply Pro's sleeves I almost can't feel them in my ears at all. The lack of tension pulling on them helps with this a great deal.

I also like the adjustable ball that allows me to cinch the left and right side together.

It seems like they sound better too, but I'm 99% sure that is all about how it is easier to position the ear pieces and there is no more tension pulling at them once they are inserted.

I'm sure I could have bent the stock cords to remove all pressure, but with these cords there is no bending, they just lay well around my ears.

I tested the boom microphone and the sound quality is fine. With the sock on it handles plosives very well. There is no popping sound at all. The voice recorded was very smooth. I also didn't hear any of the Aero's fan. I need to try it with my rig running, but so far so good.

Here is a quick mic test.

 

[RCHeliguy]

It came with two plugs, one was 5 poles.
I'm using the 4 pole plug and the cord came off the plug a little too easily for my taste.

I got a good suggestion to use glue gun since it's non-destructive and can be removed, followed by the suggestion to use shrink wrap.

I'm going to run with this a while and see if it holds.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

It seems like they sound better too

Mark is turning into true audiophile.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Mark is turning into true audiophile.

I know it has zero to do with the silver wire. I'm "speculating" it has to do with not pulling at the inserts. But I will very quickly concede that it still could be more of that user break-in period.

The human brain is completely unreliable in anything but a blind test and preferably double blind.

I need to see how the microphone sounds when my rig is busy like in Dirt Rally 2.0 in Greece.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Yeah, minds play lots of trick on us, reason snake oil salesmen thrive in audio business.

 

[RCHeliguy]

In all my mucking around with the Varjo, it appears that I somehow did something that updated the Dirt Rally 2.0 .ini files and I've lost my D-Box temporarily ( only in Dirt Rally )

So I did a mic test while in Dirt Rally 2.0 with full Tactile, G-Belt and FFB, in the Aero, but without my D-Box system working and I got the best time I ever got on a stage. I missed the motion feel, but... well...

I need to get the motion back to be sure about this, but I felt like I was judging hairpin corners much better with the Aero. I need to make sure this isn't an artifact of turning off motion which is sadly possible. For all the people who say they drive better with motion there are always a number of others who say they are faster without it.

To be fair it was killing me not having motion in Rally

 

[metalnwood]

I dont know that I can say you could drive faster with it, I generally think you don't have to be slower. You can get cues from motion that might make you drive slower, more cautious etc. When just like real life, the car can be brutal and you drive through it. For instance I think many people including myself when I first got motion may come off throttle too often going by what they are feeling rather than what the car is actually doing - and its not doing anything different than what it was before we had motion.

In the end, for single player I would care if it changed my driving and I ended up being slower. For other things where I do care, then you just have to keep taking the fastest route, even it it may be more uncomfortable.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I forgot to mention that the mic test went well. My voice was far louder than any other sound it picked up.

It basically sounded quiet except when I was talking. You could very barely hear the transducers and the G-Belt was a bit more distinguishable. I could hear a tiny bit of the Dirt Rally sound track leaking out of the IEM's.

The bottom line is that I could both have a conversation easily and not worry about any speech recognition software having issues.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Dirt Rally motion is working again. How I fixed it makes zero sense to me, but I'll take it. I did make copies of my hardware_settings_config.xml files in case they get modified again.

I did get a response from Luca at D-Box support who was going to test things this morning and I've let him know I have it working so he doesn't waste his time.

Fun stuff...

 

[RCHeliguy]

I got DCS running under OpenXR now and it is more efficient than OpenVR, but it's still easy to keep a couple CPU cores near maxed out and get the 4090 near maxed out, but the difference is that in OpenXR it's running smoothly even if it's in the 70's fps. With OpenVR it was stuttering.

I like DCS much better in the Aero than anything else I've used. I can crisply read every control and the usable view is excellent.

I had MSFS working earlier with the Reverb G2 and Valve Index, but I'm starting to really not like this application. It takes forever to boot up, requires huge downloads. Today's was 1.4Gb and then requires that I authenticate with a known MS user account. I want to drop kick it before I'm even running it. That and it crashed on me multiple times allowing me to enjoy this long boot process repeatedly. And while it remembered my control configuration, it required that I reselect the configurations for each device after not running it for a couple months. ( Edit: A lot of that lag time disappeared once everything was working properly and it now has been restarting pretty quickly )

I have MSFS2000 running in the Aero now too. That was the last title I had to try!

Everything has been configured to work well with the Aero now.

Still liking the IEM's the best. I tried the over the head earphones earlier today and they didn't want to stay put in Rally.

 

[RCHeliguy]

It's official I've become a believer in the mid 70's frame rate for flight sims. The Aero handles slower frame rates easily without stuttering. Everything still looks smooth and for flight, I'm willing to lower the frame rates to run the higher graphics settings.

The Aero was made for sims and I'm very happy with my 90fps in iRacing and Dirt Rally 2.0. I don't think I'd want to drop the frame rate there. And I'm OK in the 70-80fps range in DCS and MSFS2000 to get the sharpness.

HOWEVER!!!! I'm only running 35ppd currently for iRacing and it's great. I can run it in some other non-sims as well, however I'm still running 27ppd for my other sims.

This will improve.

Foveated rendering with eye tracking is only accessible in some titles like iRacing, but not others like DCS.
DLSS 3 is available in MSFS2000, but not DCS. DCS claims DLSS 3 support is coming soon.

So the Aero still has untapped potential even running with a 13900K&4090, but through software that will improve over the time between now and the next big GPU release.

I just saw someone gushing about MSFS at 30fps with some new reprojection giving him 90fps. He claimed he was in heaven. Below is a video showing this new experimental Varjo feature.

So the support for this headset and higher end higher resolution headsets in general is being very actively developed right now and I'm seen new tools and efficiency improvements being posted on almost a weekly basis. I'm having trouble keeping up, but apparently people are very motivated to make these headsets work better.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Also a DBox with flight update. I've gone to an 80 / 20 split in favor of motion over haptics and the motion in the helicopter was at least noticeable now and tracks well enough. I may just give up on haptics in flight completely and go to 100/0 split.

 

[GagarynGaribaldi]

Also a DBox with flight update. I've gone to an 80 / 20 split in favor of motion over haptics and the motion in the helicopter was at least noticeable now and tracks well enough. I may just give up on haptics in flight completely and go to 100/0 split.

I foresee pitchforks, cries of "heretic", and you being burned on a stake...

 

[RCHeliguy]

I foresee pitchforks, cries of "heretic", and you being burned on a stake...

In flight the issue for me has been that the engine haptics would ruin the travel making it feel notchy even at low values, so I turned it off. That was at the recommended 50/50.

At 80/20 the engine effect didn't feel bad, and the key limitation in flight is range of motion. This split appears this frees up more range of motion. Of course they've updated their Motion Core software a few times since I was last in DCS so they could have refined something else as well.

I do also still have SimShaker for Aviators running against my TST and BK-CT in the seat only and that adds some.

The extra motion is a big deal to me. I finally started to get that cyclic stick feel on a helicopter and I could feel more pitch and roll in a plane. The changes were smooth and gradual such that in VR it worked. My inner ear could feel the changes even if they were small. It continues to amaze me how the human brain will reconcile small movements when done correctly while in VR to larger motions.

I also increased the G-Belt force a bit and I could still tweak the G-Belt settings some more.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Quick test of the Kimera Gramr IEM boom microphone's rejection of rig noise.

I added hot glue to the boom connection since it was easy to knock off and I was worried about wearing out the snap connection.

I like having the boom attached since it is easy to feel for and it is light, so I don't feel it in place. The precurved thin loop of plastic covering the wire is much more comfortable than the harder bendable metal on the stock Sure wires. The Comply Pro Mediums inserts fit my ears extremely well. I don't have to squish them at all before insertion. I can just push them in while pulling back on my ear. They appear to self-center well and these plastic ear loops don't pull them off center. The Comply Pro's are a bit longer than the regular Comply's. The Shure earphone form factor is small and they fit inside my ears without any rubbing I can feel.

 

[RCHeliguy]

My attempt at a review of the Aero.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I've made comments that running the Aero in ACC might be a lost cause.

However, I'm seeing that @Cooknn has used OpenXR toolbox to Override the resolution and set it to 2904x2489 and then set super sampling to 130% in ACC allowing him to get close to 90fps at a pretty high ppd. That is not the full extent of the settings he figured out, but it seems to be the key that makes it work.

So it appears that where there is a will there is a way to coax more performance out of these headsets.

My guess is that some of these techniques may carry over to other headsets.

Edit: I'm also hearing echos of how ACC and RaceKraft and anything using Unreal engine without Forward Rendering are "lost".

I think I'll just be happy that the titles I like using look good. This is a huge rabbit hole to go down.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I have a friend coming over today who has a Quest 2. He wants to try out the sim rig and the Aero. It will be interesting to hear his thoughts.

 

[RCHeliguy]

He said that the Quest 2 compared to the Aero was like going from an NES to the XBox.

He crashed the helicopter into a building.

Absolutely loved Dirt Rally 2.0!!! And was laughing his ass off the whole time.

He decided racing was a bit hard.

We went with the surround sound audio solution. It was easier to talk that way and he had piles of questions. I think from now on, I'll just use the surround audio whenever I have a guest over.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I'm finding the Varjo base software and lens combination more interesting over time. It's not perfect, but it keeps improving.

The Aero aspheric lenses are designed with something that I would almost call a physical version of fixed foveated rendering even though that really isn't correct. The lenses focus more pixels into the center of your view increasing the resolution there.

The base software is doing a lot of backflips to render what you see in a natural way. A couple years ago there were issues with chromatic aberrations and distortions that were all fixed with software. There are some people who have mentioned a red shift / blue shift issue that I've not noticed. I'm reading that this may be related to a person's IPD.

I have noticed a bit of a motion blur artifact at times. I've been told that it a result of how they are handling time warp in software and that it is not a hardware issue. It seems more noticeable in some titles and at some frame rates and resolutions than others. I think it is something that you may become accustomed to over time. I'm rarely noticing it anymore. I've not noticed it in DCS or Dirt Rally. I have playing "In Death". When I first tried out the headset I had a negative knee jerk reaction and then basically forgot about it and only rarely notice it now. Given the variability of how this shows up, I'm hopeful that they will at some point resolve this completely. I continue to suspect that it may be related to how smooth things look at lower frame rates.

I asked my friend last night if he noticed any motion blur of any kind and he said he hadn't noticed. He was in 5 titles last night, 2 room scale, 1 flight and 2 racing sim over about 5 hours. He was probably actively in VR 3 hours of that time. I think he was a bit overwhelmed by it all especially the rig. He seemed to notice all of it and how it worked together.

The automatic IPD adjustment has been reliably measuring my IPD at 64.5mm, so the eye tracking is consistent. Briefly after it adjusts your IPD it shows circles tracking where you are looking. I'm reading that the stereo overlap is better the smaller your IPD, and as your IPD increases and the lenses move outwards and stereo overlap drops off. By how much as a percentage, I don't know.

Related to software, the most recent Sadley Its Bradley mentioned that Valve is spending money to support some people advancing OpenXR. Considering how critical that standard is to making higher end headsets work well, I'm very happy to hear they are investing more into it. Everyone wins with that type of investment.