S8 distortion and flicker in cardboard VR

Unity Engine
1

Testing cardboard VR on a Samsung S8 (Unity 2017.3) and it is not so great because:

  1. The stereo rendering stretches the full width of the phone which seems to lead to a kind of fish-eye distortion in the cardboard compared with a S7.

  2. It seems to enable a low-persistence mode which can make the view appear darker and more flickery: Need API to toggle low persistence mode off to reduce flicker · Issue #480 · googlevr/gvr-android-sdk · GitHub

Can either of these issues be fixed through Unity or are they part of Google’s code?

2

Are you running the device in WQHD+ resolution settings? If not, try that and see if it changes and let me know.

3

yes full resolution.

#2 only occurs if you have Google VR Services turned on (a warning pops up about turning it on if you do not have it on): Settings/Apps/Special Access/VR helper services - Google VR Services.
Presumably designed to ‘improve’ VR but if you look at it outside of cardboard it is a little strange.

4

andyz,

Thank you for reporting this. Few questions for you:

  1. Which version of Google VR Services is installed on the device, or what is the output of this command?
    $ adb shell pm dump com.google.vr.vrcore | grep version

  2. When you tap the Gear icon in the top right corner of VR mode, which viewer is configured under “Headset”? And, does this headset match the actual headset you’re using?

  3. If you place the phone in the headset, are you able to see the image correctly? That is, are your eyes able to converge the stereo image? Or, do you “see double” when you look through the viewer?

  4. With the latest Google VR Services the VR view should display correctly regardless of resolution. Just for testing purposes, want to confirm that you see the problem even when you set WQHD+ resolution?
    Settings > Display > Screen resolution > WQHD+ > APPLY.

  5. It would be helpful to see screenshots. Do they look like the ones in Double vision on Samsung S7 (N+) using VrVideoView · Issue #500 · googlevr/gvr-android-sdk · GitHub?