• Apps

  • DeoVR v HereSphere

I only use DEO for PT and for the exclusive SLR scenes. Once Pt is on HS I will prob just download the SLr scenes I like and use that exclusively. DEO app is very slow, cluttered (too many options/menus) and it does seem that it sacrifieces resolution and quality for bandwidth space. It also crashes from time to time. The individual settings to adjust the image (sharpbess, brightness, etc) aren’t as fine tuned either. +1 move in DEO is like +10 on HS so you can dial things in much better on HS. HS is complex though and there’s a lot of stuff you can do on it that you don’t really need it’s very confusing and tough learning curve though he is working on fixing the UI

Extreme white balance / color fixing in Heresphere. You can't do much to this classic Czech VR scene in DEO. Although there's no "white balance" setting in Heresphere, the color tools are sophisticated enough to get pretty close to a realistic look. This is just a screen grab from the headset, so not 100% representative of what you actually see through the Meta Quest lens, but you get the point. In DEO, this scene is pretty bad. And I can share the Heresphere hsp file with others so they can benefit from my tweaks.

In DEO, images fall apart very easily. If you increase contrast too much or decrease brightness, black levels go to gray, and dark shadows can be darker than true blacks. So you are limited in exposure / tonal adjustments as well as limited by the extremely basic color tools.
This is not an extreme example, but if you look closely you can see that Kiara's open mouth and eyes go from black to gray in DEO as you compensate for Lethalhardcore's very low contrast grading. This never happens with HS. If you have the skill, you can get a much more realistic look from many scenes that DEO can't salvage.

And crucially, HS has key frames. So as exposure and camera angles change throughout a scene, you can add points of adjustment to fix everything. In DEO, all changes are global, so it's not worth doing more than the most basic tweaks.

after using the demo for months, I have decided to buy the Heresphere app. It's such a great player, it even fixes the crappy virtualporn scenes so they become watchable after a few tweaks.

agree with pretty much everything that @vrpicasso said.

Agree with everything said, I also find Heresphere much superior when it comes to image quality and customization.

From a business standpoint, I still don't fully understand the decision to demand money from the HS developer for the integration and things then falling apart, but SLR then using vastly more resources and time on developing and integrating DEO, which is just a worse product. Plus Deo is free, so unless there's a grand future plan, it's not like you even made money out of this investment.

It sort of reminds me of the early internet browser wars. It's really important to control the portal, because whoever controls the gateway to VR porn controls the space. Heresphere is like Netscape, powerful, disruptive and not aligned to any corporate entity, while SLR is following Microsoft's route. To be fair to SLR they have always realised the importance of the platform and so invested heavily in their own player and ecosystem, while other VR companies are left relying on third party solutions. But as HS evolves into a serious "competitor" (even though it's not competing on content), SLR can't ignore its advances, or the needs of the consumer. It will be interesting to see how the future pans out.

    vrpicasso it's too lose comparison. I'd wish things would be like that.

    VR is nowhere like internet either.

    Otherwise we do our best to get things work. We just need a few cool and hardcore unity engineers to get everything going.

      I don’t think SLR is going to win on Deo or on a video player. HS is already ahead and if any of the major studios with the capital decide to make one they’ll instantly also jump ahead. The one thing SLR has going for them is the original content, and the PT content. So they should double down on that imo. There are people complaining about PT just because it’s not fully there yet, but if SLR continues to make it better and improve the PT and content people will eventually love it. Also need much higher quality girls for the PT. Sisi is really the only good one they’ve done so far in that format. Everyone else is mediocre.

      Timbama First impressions of HS PT:

      • Working out of the box for alpha videos. Main difference to DeoVR I noticed is how both players process the edges of images (i.e. the edges of body parts). Not sure yet if one way is better or worse than the other. DeoVR has like a thin glowing halo on the edges, while HS does not but instead seems to create artifacts on the edges.
      • Chroma key PT: I am lost in space. Maybe the chroma key color selection is only supposed to be used for green screen videos (not tested) but I tried making a regular VR vid into PT (like @Vrsumo2017 does with DeoVR) and that seems to involve endless fiddling with up to 34 individual parameters that you have to type in (no sliders). Didn't even know where to start.

          SchnuppiLilac Chroma key PT: I am lost in space. Maybe the chroma key color selection is only supposed to be used for green screen videos (not tested)

          That's what chroma masking is for, from how I read it. If there's a big part of an image in the same colour (like a green or blue screen as background), it will make those pixels transparent.

              Timbama

              I tried and indeed, chroma key masking seems to work quite well if it's a green screen video.

              After making the green transparent, there remains a thin green line around the edges (which I managed to turn into a white line), so some further adjustments will probably be needed to make it perfect.

                I’m very disappointed with the Hs update because it’s intended only for Greenscreen or blue screen PT videos. So pretty useless when using regular vr vids. It will be good if and when companies start producing more PT but at the moment have to work with like the 10 videos that exist.