Oculus's latest headset, the Oculus Quest 2, can playback 8K video footage at 60fps and it looks amazing! The sharpness and detail it delivers is certainly the best I've experienced on any VR headset... so far!
The Oculus Quest 2's new screens, with a native resolution of 1,832 × 1,920 per eye, delivers a superb image with negligible, if any, discernible screen-door effect where the screens pixels were previously clearly visible.
I've heard of some users online having issues exporting to h.265 @ 8K 60fps from Adobe Premiere Pro but can say I haven't experienced any problems, so I thought I'd share my findings here.
My most recent project creating a VR film for a renewable energy company required the utmost detail in the shots in order to present as close to a realistic vision of the environment as possible. Early tests using the Oculus Go and Insta360's Crystal View Moments player was reasonably good but no matter what player was used on the headset the native pixel resolution still presented the screen-door effect. So we switched to using the Oculus 2 with great effect.
The initial plan was to do the 2D 360 edit in Adobe Premiere using footage shot on the Insta360 Pro. As the footage lacked any substantial motion we decided to switch to using 12K burst-mode stills that had been captured at the same time so our initial edit was actually done at 12K then exported at 8K 60fps. Apart from the footage the final edit was sequenced to voice over and had a VR motion graphics introduction and a composite end sequence which featured relevant stock footage.
The export was done directly from Adobe Premiere Pro v14.3.2 (graphics card drivers updated to latest version). I used VBR @ the maximum rate of 60Mbit with a resolution of 7680 x 3840. As the film was primarily made up of still images and a custom created intro, adapting to 60fps required minimal effort.
The final footage played seamlessly on the Quest 2 using Oculus TV - sadly their useful Gallery App has been discontinued. The footage looks amazing, this is such an incredible step-up from the Oculus Go that the extra £100 for the 64GB version is a bargain and that's without even considering the 6DoF programmed VR content.
CLOSING NOTE: It should be noted that Oculus has apparently advised that a resolution of 7200 x 3600 is optimal for video playback and I can confirm there was no noticeable visual difference between this and a full 7680x3840 so I reduced my final output to meet this standard.
Andrew Murchie is a creative technology consultant based in Edinburgh, Scotland specialising in stereoscopic 3d virtual reality films. He has produced Virtual Reality experiences for clients including Kimberly-Clark, Kraft-Heinz, Loch Lomond Distillers, Highland Spring and Tennent Caledonian Breweries.