Valve has finally given Index a full reveal and has announced that the headset will be available for pre-order starting tomorrow and is due to ship by the end of June. We recently visited Valve's offices for a hands-on with Index, which the company hopes will set the bar for VR fidelity. After much rumor and speculation, Valve is finally ready to reveal Index, and the company is making no mystery of its intentions—to raise the bar for VR fidelity. At a press event at the company's Bellevue, WA headquarters last week, members of Valve's VR team laid out their thesis; VR needs to advance in three key areas: affordability, ease of use, and fidelity. And their conclusion is that Valve is best suited to work on the latter, while leaving the rest to others in the industry. Read about Index pre-orders, specs, and pricing To that end, Index is all about delivering a great experience once you're all set up and strapped in, and on that front it really seems to deliver. But, it doesn't really make any strides in the ease-of-use department (more on that later). [caption id="attachment_87806" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image courtesy Valve[/caption] At the event, Valve's VR team explained that the fidelity of the VR experience is not defined by a single spec, but rather many little details that all need to be done well to achieve a high fidelity experience. As such, Valve aimed to design a headset which gets the details right. Though Valve didn't manufacture the Vive, they did contribute significant R&D to the headset and regularly referenced it as a point of comparison for Index (so we'll do the same). So what has Valve done to try to get all the details right to raise the bar on VR fidelity? First is the displays, which (surprisingly to me) are now LCD (instead of OLED), and have a resolution of 1,440 × 1,600 per display. That's a decent jump in resolution over the Vive (at 1,080 × 1,200). And while it's the same on-paper resolution as the Vive Pro, the move from OLED to LCD means many more sub-pixels which further boost apparent resolution. Valve says that there's 50% more sub-pixels in the LCD display than in an equivalent OLED display. [caption id="attachment_87782" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Index displays on a test bed | Image courtesy Valve[/caption] But resolution isn't the only critical factor, Valve contends. The display is also the first in any headset, the company says, to offer sub-pixel persistence. Persistence is how long a pixel remains lit, and in a VR, lower is better because illuminating pixels for less time reduces blur during head movement. But this is challenging because when you reduce the illumination time, you also reduce brightness, which means that you need a display that can get very bright, very fast. While the original Vive has an illumination time of 1.85ms, which can result in persistence blurring of 2-3 pixels, Index's pixels illuminate in just 0.33ms which achieves sub-pixel (effectively invisible) persistence blurring, Valve says. On top of that, Index's displays can run at refresh rates of 90Hz, 120Hz, and 144Hz (though the last is 'experimental'). After the display comes the lenses, and Valve is one of the first to move to a dual-element optic which they say has been optimized for a large field of view and a large sweet spot. [caption id="attachment_87882" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Index lenses (foam removed) | Photo by Road to VR[/caption] The displays and optics are paired with two adjustments that help users get the most out of them: interpupillary distance (IPD) and eye-relief. IPD allows the user to change the distance between the lenses in order to best align their eye with the optical center. The physical IPD range on Index goes from 58mm to 70mm, which covers the vast majority of users. Eye-relief allows the user to bring the lenses closer to their eyes, which allows optimal alignment with the sweet spot along the Z-axis and maximum field of view. The original Vive and Vive Pro have a similar adjustment, but their lenses can't get as close to the eye as Index allows. Valve claims that with the eye-relief adjustment—and displays which are canted by five degrees to each side to further expand the FOV—most users will see a field of view that's about 20 degrees larger than what they would see from Vive (which has been quoted around 110 degrees, putting Index around 130 degrees field of view, by Valve's reckoning). [caption id="attachment_87876" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The dial on the right of the headset adjusts the eye-relief | Photo by Road to VR[/caption] And finally, audio, for which Valve developed a very interesting solution that is likely to be copied by many headsets to come. They call it 'nearfield off-ear speakers', which is a fancy way of saying 'the speakers hang down next to your ears but do not rest on them'. This seems unimportant, but it allows Index to bring the same benefits of the 'audio pipe' approach that we've seen in other recent headsets (they don't get in the way of putting on the headset) but with drastically better audio quality. Continue Reading on Page 2: Using Index » So, that's what Valve says. What's it like to actually use the headset? I got to test Index across several different demos and came out very impressed with what I saw. [caption id="attachment_87881" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Photo by Road to VR[/caption] The upgrades to the display—both in low persistence and refresh rate—really make the VR world look more 'solid' than ever before. 144Hz looks buttery smooth and feels closer to what you'd expect the real world to look like by pushing latency even lower than typical 90Hz headsets. These two elements are arguably a bigger improvement to the visuals than the upgraded resolution which, indeed, brings a sharper image, but is still far from eliminating the screen door effect. Field of view is definitely higher than the Vive—thanks to the eye-relief adjustment easily allowing me to dial in the maximum field of view—but the difference didn't exactly blow me away despite being nice to have. I was able to pull the eye-relief adjustment in as far as it would go while still being perfectly comfortable (some folks might pull back a bit to stop their eyelashes from touching). At that range, I could slightly make out the edges of the display in my peripheral view on the sides and bottom, though I could have easily pulled the eye-relief back just a touch to make that more apparent. While Valve's dual-element optics might be focused on a wide field of view and large sweet spot, it seems to have come at the cost of an increase in internal reflections (god rays). Moderately high contrast scenes cause significant glare which unfortunately detracts from the other benefits in clarity. [caption id="attachment_87879" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Photo by Road to VR[/caption] On the audio front, Valve has done an excellent job with their new headphone design. Index easily has the highest quality audio solution I've ever heard in a VR headset. It's miles ahead of any of the sound-pipe solutions seen in headsets like Go, Quest, and Rift S, and even better than Rift's headphones which were considered the best, until now. What's cool is that not only do they sound better than the previous leader, they also feel better—or perhaps they don't feel like anything... because they don't actually touch your ears at all, they just hang next to them. This simple but smart design means Valve was able to use larger and more powerful drivers which are capable of greater range than other audio solutions. Index's headphones get plenty loud and deliver a ton of bass. Valve says that going with off-ear speakers benefits not just audio quality, but ergonomics too. Not only are they not in the way at all when you put on the headset, they also don't exert any pressure on your ears as you play, helping another fatigue vector. One surprising omission from Index is eye-tracking. For all the work that Valve has put into getting the details right, eye-tracking could have synergized very well—everything from telling the user their exact IPD and how to set it, to whether their headset is adjusted for optimal clarity, to foveated rendering to make it easier to achieve stable 144Hz gameplay, and plenty more. We haven't gotten an answer from Valve on why they opted not to include eye-tracking. - - — - - Beyond the headset, Valve is of course pairing Index with the Knuckles controllers and pulling everything together with their SteamVR Tracking solution. Even though it creates more friction for use compared to inside-out tracking, Valve believes the quality of their tracking solution is critical to the fidelity of the experience. [caption id="attachment_87880" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Photo by Road to VR[/caption] So then what about the cameras on the front of the headset? Valve said that they are "very good computer vision cameras," but they don't plan to use them officially for tracking; inside-out tracking "isn't quite there for us." They don't exactly have a firm use-case for them right now, but wanted to make sure they were on board for experimentation and, at a minimum, pass-through video. That said, they plan to release all the code behind the cameras so that developers can play, and more than likely someone will try implementing an unofficial inside-out tracking solution for the headset. [caption id="attachment_87877" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Photo by Road to VR[/caption] The cameras are one of several ways that Valve hopes Index will be moddable. They call that big gap behind the magnetic faceplate the 'frunk' (which I can only assume is a portmanteau of 'front' and 'trunk'), and say it's purely a generic expansion port for whatever mods people might dream up that rely on a USB 3.0 port. They claim not to have any specific use-case in mind for the frunk, but hope that people will experiment. [caption id="attachment_87802" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The 'frunk' expansion port hides behind a magnetically-attached faceplate | Image courtesy Valve[/caption] Further on modability, Valve says they will release full CAD models of Index to make it easy for people to design different things for the headset, like the foam face padding which is magnetic and easily removed. Using the CAD models, someone could print a new design for the padding bracket to better fit their face. - - — - - So, Index looks and sounds pretty damn good, and seems like it will achieve Valve's goal of moving the bar forward on VR fidelity. Yes, there are higher resolution headsets out there, like HP's upcoming Reverb, but Index brings more than a spec sheet to the table—it offers high-end quality across the spectrum. That said, Index—openly admitted by Valve—does little to address the challenges of cost and ease-of-use. [caption id="attachment_87878" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Photo by Road to VR[/caption] The full Index kit (with headset, controllers, and base stations) will cost a cool $1,000—that's more than the original Vive at launch (but less than Vive Pro). The outside-in tracking necessitates setting up and maintaining a VR space with some cords running around the room, and the headset's many adjustments need an experienced user to understand how to dial everything in to achieve top fidelity. And then there's the content. These improvements in fidelity are exciting to me and plenty of other enthusiasts, but they just don't matter that much in the end if they aren't backed up by excellent content. Despite thousands of VR games on Steam, only a small fraction of those are truly worth playing, and existing enthusiasts—which Valve says Index is positioned towards—will have already gotten their fill of much of that content. With the reveal of Index, Valve is saying that they plan to release a "flagship VR game" at some point this year, but—incredibly—still aren't ready to offer any details at all (not even a name, IP, or genre), even as Index is about to become available for pre-order and then launch within the next two months. Facebook, of course, is taking nearly the opposite approach and focusing not on fidelity, but ease of use and affordability, and they have a strong content library (and a handful of exciting titles coming down the pipeline) to back it up. [caption id="attachment_87781" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image courtesy Valve[/caption] But that's not to say one approach is right and the other is wrong. Valve has chosen their fight, and they want to take on the challenge they believe they're best equipped to handle. And for Index, that's pushing the quality bar to show everyone else what the next level of fidelity looks like. - - — - - Got more questions? We've got more answers. Drop us a line in the comments below. Disclosure: Valve covered travel and accommodations for Road to VR to attend an event where information for this article was gathered.