Bigscreen’s Beyond head-mounted display, or HMD, has been widely hyped and praised for its high pixel density and small size. And I can attest to it—it’s phenomenal. My first experience of the device, though, was so far from the advertised “world of immersion” I was promised, it alarmed me to such an extent that I drafted a scathing review and nearly returned it.

Being a VR enthusiast, the Beyond excited me as it did many others. Despite some tradeoffs, delivering such high pixel densities contained in the space a fraction of other HMDs is a leap forward in the VR space. Bigscreen delivered on their promise, and I haven’t used my Valve Index in months.

The Beyond failed spectacularly the first time, though. The device I was shipped had a face cushion too thick and its screens too far apart. After going through support and getting a replacement, I’m very happy with it. Onwards!

The scan

Unlike any other HMD, Bigscreen builds a HMD with screens aligned to your IPD and prints a facial interface matching the topography around your eyes. The inter-pupillary distance, or IPD, between your eyes is manufactured into the device. They find out what distance to give you from a 3D scan of your face. (This also means you can’t share it with anyone else, unless they open up purchasing a new print for that friend who has the same IPD as you.)

Have an iPhone XR or newer? No? OK, use a friend’s or family member’s. They’re all Android? Fine, go to the nearest Apple Store. Not near an Apple Store? I have no idea what you’d have to do then. My own iPhone is too old, necessitating a trip to an Apple Store.

I felt a little embarrassed to be scanning my face there, especially using the display phones for as long as I did. Though it didn’t really matter that I was there; there were plenty of phones on display for others. (I also went to the same Apple Store two weeks later to review the brand new Vision Pro.)

What you had to do was use one of the iPhones on display, scan a QR code, install an app (it may have been an App Clip), and follow the instructions. Move your head slowly up and down, then left and right. The works.

I had to scan twice; the first one inexplicably failed. At first I thought was the store wasn’t bright enough. But upon reflection that couldn’t be the case as iPhones use projected infrared lasers for FaceID. The second attempt finished successfully.

This Apple Store visit was two months after I had ordered it. It felt pretty slow to get to this point. The Index took two weeks longer to get into my hands, but that was at the beginning of COVID lockdowns, so I don’t know what was up.

Headset: take one

Another month would pass before the Beyond even shipped to me.

It came in a small box, decorated with blue circuit board patterns. They call it the “Cyberbox”. An appropriate usage of ‘cyber’, though it evokes two recent disasters of products sharing the prefix. Perhaps fitting, since actually trying it was a disaster.

My first impression was… uh… quite negative.

Using it left me both enraged and disappointed. The HMD I bought was simply garbage. So much was wrong that I was at a loss of words to describe it all. I eventually found my keyboard and wrote down my thoughts. Here’s how I felt, written after a few days of trying it:

The Beyond was something I was super excited about, and I was aware that Bigscreen made tradeoffs for the size and lightness. That said, those tradeoffs are not supposed to mean that it’s as unusable as it is. Somehow, instead of being on par with the Valve Index—a device released in 2019—it’s much worse. I’m aghast.

“Ahghast” described how I felt perfectly.

Color accuracy

As soon as I put it on, I saw the first glimpse of my Beyond’s poor color. Take gray, for instance. When SteamVR fails to get a good track of your HMD, rather than throwing you around or freezing you in place, disorienting you, it fades the displays to a solid light gray. Except, on this Beyond, that light gray was more like a yellowy-green.

The difference was stark, unacceptable for a $1000 device to have such trash colors. Everything was affected, and everything looked slightly off. White had the most pronounced change.

This seemed like a calibration issue at the factory. I felt that lacking color calibration on the displays it touts as having “Next-generation visual fidelity” and “Jaw-dropping visuals” was a massive failure to deliver.

(Sidenote, to change the color balance of your SteamVR HMD, you have two options. One is to go into your SteamVR folder and mess around with the steamvr.vrsettings file, as described here. Or, more easily, you can use the excellent free SteamVR app OVR Advanced Settings: Video > Color Adjustment, where you can adjust the RGB percentages.)

I dampened the green channel to about 80%, which helped, but somehow still remained off-color in a way that I couldn’t figure out what was still wrong.

Joker mode

The color wasn’t the biggest problem, sticking out as it did. What I saw in VR, when the lighthouses spun up and began tracking, was a deplorable mess. Everything hazed. Straight on, normally the sharpest view of things, had as much chromatic abberation and haze as looking at the edges in my Valve Index. And it progressively worsened the farther from the center I looked. Locking my eyes onto an object and tilting my head in figure-eights would have this haze move around.

Internal reflections made text hard to read anywhere. And it was so distracting. Big splotches of color from one part of the display would bounce around into other parts of my vision.

Again, color is fixable. You can compensate in software. This could not be compensated. My god was it bad.

This part made me feel royally ripped off. I spent $1,000 on this, waited three months, and got a piece of crap. I was pretty close to returning it, only that returning it means forfeiting a $200 “restocking fee”.

Compared to the extraordinarily positive reviews by YouTubers, I felt stupefied. Befuddled. Incredulous. Let down. I skeeted about it. I drafted a blog post trampling on it. I told my friends about my horrid experience.

Please save me from hell

Detailing what I had experienced, I sent an email to Bigscreen’s support, asking what was up. I described the color, the haze, the reflections, and how I was disappointed by the Beyond.

Support replied, explaining that they likely got my IPD wrong and printed the facial interface too thick. It turns out the scan botched the reported IPD, adding millimeters to what it actually was. That’s a really big problem, not just for the customer. Not only did this mean that they spent time and money custom-printing a new face cushion, I’m probably one of many who got a Beyond which did not align.

And I’m not sure why it got both so wrong, either. The face cushion fit snugly, so it got that topology correct. Though it also made it too thick. The website copy advertises that they review each scan, but I’m not sure what they look for.

As for the color, the support rep said that it might have to do with the displays having a colder color temperature compared to the Valve Index. If the misalignment caused these other problems, it might also have been a factor in that, too. (I’m not confident in either assessment.)

I printing a shipping label and sent it in the mail, at no cost to me.

It would take another six weeks from there to get the replacement.

Take two: restored expectations

When the new Beyond came in, finally, it actually worked as advertised. The IPD was correct and the interface was thinned. This time, they got it right. Part of me was worried it would still be wrong, since I didn’t perform another face scan. Nope! I put it on, and felt the same magic I felt when I put on my Index for the first time. I mean, now I could get the experience everyone else was having.

Because everyone had been right about the Beyond. It lives up to the hype. I could see with my own two eyes the high-resolution displays. They’re fantastic.

It really was enchanting, especially after what I had just gone through. I could actually look past and see the virtual reality in front of me.

Since then, I’ve used it for dozens of hours, likely 100–200 hours, and mostly in VRChat. After all that time, I feel very confident in a proper review of this sick device.

What you get …and what you don’t

For a whole $1000, you get the Beyond HMD, a custom face mold, two straps (one for the back of the head and one for the top), a 5 meter USB-C cable, and a breakout box with two USB-A plugs and a DisplayPort plug. But what you don’t get: base stations ($150 each), Knuckles controllers ($280 for a pair), or any sound.

If you want sound, bring your own. Except, there’s no headphone jack on the device, which I wrongly assumed there would be, even though one should absolutely be there. To get any sound, you need to either connect a Bluetooth device for wireless sound, get a USB-C to headphone jack dongle, or, what I’ve been doing, put my normal headphones on and use a really long cord.

Bigscreen is selling a $130 hard strap with speakers, but why this wasn’t available when it launched, or even bundled in, I have no idea. They seem like an afterthought. It also is shipping so many months late.

For a value comparison, the Valve Index comes with two base stations, a pair of Knuckles, and over-ear speakers, for the same price of the Beyond. And you can share it (as I’ve done a bunch). Starting with only the Beyond, to get a comparable setup means paying an additional $710.

Beautiful displays

When I say the Beyond is sharp, I mean it. It’s not quite Retina, but it’s really sharp. One VRChat world I joined had a very beautiful black hole. I mean, it was really pretty to see in the game. And I’m glad to have seen that world for the first time with the Beyond’s high pixel density. The sharpness brings clarity and realism to everything in VR. Text was much, much sharper and easier to read. Water had finer waves and clearer shimmering. There is more detail in textures to feast your eyes on.

This and the small form factor are, after all, the primary selling points of the device. And I feel like it’s lived up to Bigscreen’s promise.

During testing on the first Beyond, I noted that the screens don’t get that bright. However, as many have written in their reviews, the brightness of them matters less when they’re not competing with the light leaking from the gap between your nose and the device. Your eyes can adjust to the lower light, and you even can up the brightness of the screens.

Are pixels gone? Not quite. Pixels are still visible—to me at least—and they become more noticeable on brighter objects and/or things with thin, contrasting lines (especially text). The pixels are still there; I still notice them. But I find them easier to ignore than in the Index. There still is progress to be made in this direction, though I’m happy with what I have. If your eyesight is worse than mine, you probably won’t see the pixels.

When I use the Beyond, I’m using it at the refresh rate of 75 Hz, rather than 90 Hz. 75 Hz does not downscale the image for transmission, and you get the full resolution. At 90 Hz, the Beyond scales the SteamVR output down to an HD image, and then upscales it back in the HMD. I don’t feel the tradeoff of a less sharp image worth the higher frame rate. VRChat doesn’t hit high frame rates anyway at that HD resolution, so I opt for the sharper image.

Performance tip: SteamVR by default already supersamples the image (I believe usually 150% of the display) on top of the native multisampling whatever game your playing. But because it’s then being compressed to a 1080p image, you’re throwing away a lot of computing power that could instead be used to render more images at a smaller size. It’s best, especially with the Beyond, to manually set the render resolution to 100%.

Conclusions

The bad

Bigscreen has something good going for them, but they need to improve the accurately of scanning faces. I warned my friends against the Beyond and nearly called the whole thing off because of the malformed scan. (I did send an addendum to those friends once getting the Beyond that fit.)

There’s a risk to buying this because you might get poor scans without even knowing. I had to call my eye doctor to check my IPD as measured by their office, and give that number to Bigscreen support.

I also am still unclear as to why the “restocking fee” is 20% of this expensive device. I am unhappy that the exchange itself took so long. I sent it in and waited weeks for it to come back. (Bigscreen did not reply to a request for comment I sent earlier in the year.)

To change the refresh rate of the display, you have to go through Bigscreen’s clunky desktop interface. It allows you to boost it to 150% or bring it down to *checks notes* -20%. (0% for some reason is not zero light.) It’s the only ways to change these settings for some reason. They should be exposed in the SteamVR menu.

I’ve had (what I assume are) some cable issues, too. One day I had what you see above, where a colorful image displayed in place of VR. A few days ago I had it only partially appear over VR. More of a concern was that I’ve had, starting this month, the Beyond sending in a constant loud noise to my computer, and annoying everyone around me. Both problems were fixed by me unplugging and plugging the USB-C cable back in at the device. (To be fair, I’ve bought two replacement cables for my Index during the time I’ve used it. Cables wear over time.)

The good

Lots of things are good about the device. The displays, as I’ve mentioned, are excellent; the device itself is tiny. In spite of the challenge of getting a working one and despite the tradeoffs, and despite this praise section being shorter than the previous, I recommend it.

I’ve completely stopped using my Valve Index now. I went from alternating between the two to exclusively using the Beyond. A few days ago, I put my Index in my closet, waiting for the next time someone else wants to use VR.