Skewed or Distorted Imagery in my Headset

[Nova66]

I have noticed recently that the images in my Vive headset are skewed. Where the Steam Home popup menu used to be a perfect rectangle, it now is more of a trapezoid with slight barrelling. The left edge of the menu is taller than the right edge and the whole thing seems to be slightly tilted away from me. So far I can see this effect in Steam Home, Bigscreen, and my own VR project.

The 3D environment seems to be rock solid and does not swim at all but close objects such as floating menus have a very annoying asymmetry to them. I can’t imagine where the problem lies but It feels like something is broken in the SteamVR compositor or the way that it corrects for image distortion.

Does any of this sound like a bug that might have been introduced recently?

[Xarovin]

Just a guess but it sounds like something could be dislodged in your headset

[LilRoss]

f

[Nova66]

Thanks for the suggestion Obliterator2. Just knowing that other people don't see the problem helps going forward. I'll try fiddling with my headset but I can't imagine what could have become dislodged as the headset hasn't received any hard jolts recently.

I've been wanting to upgrade my Vive headset for some time now but the Valve Index is not available in Australia and I feel kind of stuck at the moment. Who knows maybe the new HP VR HMD will turn out to be worth while and hopefully their distribution network includes Australia this time :-)

[Nova66]

I’m still seeing the problem with the skewed display. I’ve tried re-seating all my cables and re-installing SteamVR (both official and beta versions) and nothing seems to improve the situation. I could easily be wrong but this feels like a problem with the way that SteamVR is presenting the imagery to my headset.

The warping is most evident when looking at a relatively near rectangular menu. The left side seems to be tilted away from me and is larger than the right side. There is also some visible barrel distortion with most of it pinching the right edge of the menu.

It feels like some kind of display translation matrix has been screwed up somewhere along the way. Does someone from Valve have any ideas about what might be going on? Could the problem be related to some recent changes to SteamVR?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is getting to be quite distracting :-(

[Nova66]

Sorry to keep spamming this thread but I’m hoping that one day someone will stumble upon a solution.

I don’t think I’ve had any software updates recently but today the nature of the warping in my headset changed seemingly all on its own. The barrelling in the image is still present but now the trapezoidal warping of the image seems to put the larger edge along the bottom and the slightly smaller edge along the top. The symmetry along the vertical axis is better than what I had to deal with before but the problem is still present, just in a different orientation.

I’m running ‘OVR Advanced Settings’. I tried uninstalling it but that made no difference. Could it have screwed up my settings in a bad way?

[Nova66]

I have finally found the cause of my problems with image warping and it had nothing to do with my computer or VR headset.

I’ve been using a small pair of John Lennon style glasses inside my VR headset because they fit more comfortably than my regular glasses. My prescription isn’t too extreme but I do have a little bit of astigmatism. The cause of my problems comes down to me wiping the lenses a little too vigorously and because of the circular nature of the John Lennon frames, the lenses have been rotating out of alignment with regard to the astigmatism in my eyes.

This explains why some days the trapezoidal warping was angled to the left and on other days it was angled to the top. Today it was warping to the left again and it finally dawned on me that the problem was with my glasses. A little bit of experimentation and the mystery was solved!

I just thought I would report back on the off chance that this explanation might help someone else :-)

[thamahn]

I had this issue in WMR, and it was not my glasses. To resolve it, I did the following:

1. Open Settings, and click/tap on the Mixed reality icon.

2. Click/tap on Environment on the left side, and click/tap on the Clear environment data button on the right side.

3. Click/tap Reset my home.

Fixed!