I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t used MSFS much recently. Finally got a new prescription and used it to correct my vision for VR with the HP Reverb G2. I’m 75-years old, have serious presbyopia (need for bifocals, requiring a diopter correction of +2.50 OD) and have had cataract surgery to remove aging blurry, yellowed natural lenses, replaced with plastic inserts for “perfect” distance vision, except that I still have astigmatism and as I continue to age (thankfully in spite of COVID!), one eye has gotten more myopic, the other more astigmatic. So what to do?! The answer would go nicely in this thread PSA: Reverb G2 small sweet spots, observations and solutions except our moderators have closed it.
I decided against prescription corrective lens inserts for my HP Reverb G2. For one thing, then the headset would be just for me and I couldn’t share it with anyone like a grandkid - “See Paris at 1,000 feet!” as my inserts would mess up the kid’s vision. And I couldn’t take my inserts to view anyone else’s non-G2 headset, etc. And it would take months to get the prescriptive headaset inserts from Europe by snail mail or whatever without a premium shipping fee.
So I decided to get “single vision distance” glasses. My prescription uncorrected for presbyopia by recommendation of my optometrist on the prescription she wrote. I decided to go to Costco Optical because they have great service and if there were any problem with the make up of the lenses, they’d redo them to my satisfaction. And it only took me a week to get the completed glasses.
As I discussed in the Small Sweet Spots thread linked above, I found that I need no presybopia correction wearing the Reverb G2. The virtual image distance is far enough away (virtually) that ~infinite focus works great for me with no + diopter correction needed.
It’s hard to be objective in comparing my unaided vision previously wearing the G2 vs. single vision distances glasses now inside the G2 after several MSFS updates and upgrading to the Nvidia 466.11 driver, which definitely seems to make things smoother and look better with the sim updates. The one thing that I notice, agreeing with CptLucky8’s observations in his Small Sweet Spot thread linked above, is that the difference in sharpness between the central sweet spot and the periphery seems much more pronounced wearing the glasses than with uncorrected vision in spite of my astigmatism and slight myopia with no glasses. But overall, one’s eyes age and my new prescription is much better than the old for seeing things in the real world and in the sim, especially on a 2D computer monitor as well as in VR. So if you haven’t done it recently, get your eyes checked and a new prescription if needed to make the sim look as good as possible!
My old glasses were pretty large-framed and they just about fit into the G2 headset with the supplied molding on. They were 148 mm between hinge points across the width of the glasses and the lens frames were 41 mm high. I deliberately got slightly smaller new glasses. The new ones were 134 mm across the width of the hinge points and 39.7 mm high. The length of the temples (side pieces) on each set were 140 mm. Just those small differences in measurement for the new glasses make it easier to don and doff the G2 headset and although I haven’t investigated it carefully, any change in FOV would probably be due to the optics of the lenses themselves as I don’t perceive the slightly smaller frames themselves as limiting the field of view in any way inside the headset.
If you were shopping for frames, what you’d see on the inside of the temple of my old frames is 56-17-140 (inside width of a single lens, distance between nose resting points for two bridges, length of temple). My new glasses are 53-18-140, with the other measurements on width between hinge points and frame height as given above. The old glasses were unsuitable not only because the prescription is out-of-date but because the whole lower half of the lenses had graduated bifocals going to +2.5 OD built into the lower lens. My total costs for lens and frames for two sets of glasses, one with bifocal correction, one with just single vision distance correction at Costco, with a special on-sale discount of $40 for the 2nd set, was $270, effectively $90 for the single vision distance glasses to use with the G2.
One other thing that might be affecting my single vision distance lens view is the Costco Optical determination of IPD was 1 to 2 mm smaller than I’ve been using. They claim their device, which measures each eye separately, is the most accurate available. They got 31.2 mm for each eye. I got 63.7 mm for both eyes with the iOS EyeMeasure app and prefer, when using unaided vision in the G2, to use 64.4 mm or so as my physical IPD for the G2. So I need to see how moving the G2 physical IPD around relative to that build into my single vision distance glasses affects the relative foveal sweet spot in the G2.