Hi all from a research department in lighting in Copenhagen,
Im currently trying to calibrate and gain better understanding of how the OR2 and the Unreal Engine work together and the thing I noticed is that if I output a really bright environment the lumen output of the oculus rift’s screen is max 85lm in contrast to getting 250 if I just open a white image on it using photoshop for example.
I have already removed the adaptation that the UE does to the environment, but it didnt help… It also doesnt seem to be a problem of framerate because I tried to tweak that as well and it didnt work.
About adaptation:
Don’t mind this if you just unchecked it in post processing, but in case you have turned off adaptation by setting equal values for min/max brightness then the entered values matter. Lower will create a brighter environment and higher will be darker. You can play with the settings if you want to force a brighter scene.
About output:
But I think the main reason for the lower luminance is that low persistence is active. Basically this is done to reduce judder/motion blur (and therefore improves the VR experience) at the cost of luminance.
More info about low persistence can be found at http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/down-the-vr-rabbit-hole-fixing-judder/
You can try test the difference by entering the console command " hmd lp on/off ". However, you will notice a significant drop in quality (smearing) when it is turned off.
I am also interested in this topic, so let me know if this was useful or you found some other causes/solutions.