Fitment and Comfort: Wearing the VR 920
The good news is that it's relatively easy to get the VR920 to fit fairly comfortably, even over eyeglasses. The retaining strap helps to secure the VR920 a great deal; without the strap you'll frequently adjust the glasses with your hands. There is an extendable bridge for your nose, and the glasses themselves tilt forward or backward so that they can be adjusted to taste. The nose bridge adjustment wasn't as robust or sturdy as I'd like when being with eyeglasses, but it did a passable job.
The bad news is that if the glasses don't stay in exactly the right spot on your face, the display quality will suffer. This is because the glasses use a system of lenses that allow your eyes to comfortably focus on the displays so close to your face, and if you're eyes aren't close to the center of each lens, then things will get blurry. The space between the displays is not adjustable, and it's a shame that the VR920 doesn't have a spacing adjustment to compensate for various distances between people's eyes. Its one-size-fits all, and while it's obvious that a spacing adjustment would be a nightmare to engineer, it's still missed. This is more of a problem when using the VR920 on top of eyeglasses, which will require periodic adjustments more often.
The bottom line is that the VR920 is fairly comfortable and adjustable. It can be used over eyeglasses, but if you have contact lenses, you'll probably be better served.
The VR920's lenses and adjustable nose bridge.
Display: Quality, Resolution and Color Depth
Each of the VR920's two screens-one for each eye-is a tiny 640x480 LCD panel. This was definitely my greatest reservation about the VR920. "How can anyone get an adequate gaming experience from a 640x480 display?" I wondered, before trying it. Yet, the first time I put on the VR920, the resolution astonished me in that it was much, much better than I envisioned 640x480 would be. With the desktop resolution set to 800x600, I really couldn't see any interpolation artifacts; text was readable, clear as day. In fact, it was so clear that I at first assumed that my windows desktop had defaulted to 640x480. Changing the resolution to 1024x768 was still passable, and I could surprisingly make out windows text, although it admittedly takes a bit of scrutinizing at that resolution. But the bottom line is, for most games, the 800x600 resolution looks surprisingly good. The interpolation actually has an inherent antialiasing effect, which smoothes out the edges of surfaces at 1024x768, which otherwise might have looked a little jaggy.
In any case, when you first put the VR920 on, the display quality leaves a very positive impression. However, once you spend some time with it - playing games or watching movies - you begin to notice that there is a great deal of color banding going on. The darks aren't particularly dark, and there is a definite lack of depth to the images. I looked for specifications for the VR920's color palette, and as I suspected, this device might be limited to 16-bit. The specifications say the VR920 display is 24-bit capable, but when I talked to Vuzix tech support and asked them a few questions about the color depth, they verified that it was about 16-bit for the time being. The interesting thing was that they said a firmware upgrade will be released in the near future that will upgrade the color depth to the 24-bit neighborhood. The firmware upgrade wasn't available at the time of my testing, but 24-bit color is much better than 16-bit and it will likely make a noticeable impact when it's released.
Finally, let's discuss size: how big did it look? My non-scientific testing method revealed that the VR920 display appeared larger than sitting a foot and a half from a 17" LCD monitor, and a little smaller than a 24" LCD monitor at that distance. It's a good size for watching movies and playing games, but it leaves quite a bit of space above and below the viewing area so you could see your keyboard, or tilt your head forward to pay attention to the world around you. This is good for practicality, but not so great if total immersion is your goal. Apparently, Vuzix offers a separate shield to block out the upper and lower view area to assist the VR experience, but in my humble opinion, it probably should have been included with the unit.
To summarize, I found the VR 920's resolution to be decent, but the color depth was a bit shallow. It's very good news that the color depth can be software-upgraded in the future with a simple firmware upgrade.
