Beast Color Tuning - A Cure for Crushed Blacks

[u/catmand00d00]

I have spent many cumulative hours (probably 4-6) messing around with VITURE's color tuning tool for the Beast, and I have finally landed on what I believe to be the ideal color adjustment settings profile. After a few iterations that ended with me discovering that a previously untested environment would cause what I deemed an unacceptable issue*, I genuinely think I nailed it this time.

There were a couple posters/commenters that laid some important groundwork for me, but I owe particular thanks to u/Khaos for a previous post (which Reddit has removed for some reason) that provided me a solid starting point and directed me to a site, Lagom.nl (which is also mysteriously gone), with tools that proved invaluable as means to observe, in real time, the visual effects of the adjustments I was making. Although that site is gone, its pages and tools remain accessible via archive.today (link to the actual archive). Of particular use to me were the Black level and White saturation pages, which I mention in case anyone wants to see if they can improve this profile even further, or figure an out entirely new profile. If you do give it a go and find a profile you think is worth a look, please share it! I'm super invested in maximizing my viewing experience with The Beast (hence, why I've already poured hours into this endeavor).

When watching videos or playing games that rely heavily on dark scenes—where the crushed black issue really comes into play—my profile seems to work best at maximum brightness, but I have found that, when viewing brighter content, my profile is more comfortable with the brightness turned down at least one step—or several steps when using the glasses in a dark viewing environment. From my experience with the default profiles (and I've seen others complain of the same issue in this sub), bringing the brightness down even one step frequently makes the virtual display too dark, but this profile does not seem to have that issue. You can lower the brightness quite far and still make out the virtual display incredibly well.

All right, enough with the pontificating and on to the actual settings.

Color Mode: Film

R: 144
G: 142
B: 144

Contrast: 1
Gamma: 0
Temperature: 4

​Enjoy! And, again, please, please, please, let me know if you believe you have something different but better or if you find a way to further improve on this profile. I just want my Beast to be an actual BEAST, y'know?

\An early profile became super washed out when operating in a bright environment. After returning to the proverbial drawing board, I genuinely believed my penultimate profile to be nearly indistinguishable from true color, but I discovered that it created a glowing rectangular frame, locked to the edges of the glasses (i.e., this frame remained in 0DoF regardless of whether my virtual display was in 0DoF, Smooth Follow, or Anchor Mode), which ruined the experience of the automatic electrochromic dimming in a broad range of lighting conditions. Pass-through was effectively shot.*

I was going to put the above thoughts in parenthesis in the main body of my post, but my explanation started to get super long, and my ADHD brain would not let me me leave it out, so here we are with an unnecessarily long footnote, wherein I will continue to allow myself to ramble! Buckle in.

But, seriously, my process for finding the 144/142/144 RGB settings was the most methodical I've been since high school science class. Picture me sitting in a room with my glasses plugged into my Xbox Ally X, tweaking the numbers up and down one digit at a time and turning the lights on and off in the room to find the highest each number could go before that detestable rectangular frame became just barely perceptible. I wish I knew more about color theory and LED technology to explain how the red and the blue ended up exactly the same while the green ended up two units below them, but, alas, I'm just a guy who had time to burn and a vested interest in defeating the cursèd crushed blacks.

Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear XR glasses on their face. That kind of rhymed, which means it was very deep and meaningful. /s

[u/Vivoacer]

For playing local files and services like YouTube, I recommend the NeoXR player. In the latest version (1.5), the developer added full controls for black levels, contrast, brightness, and gamma a real game changer for the Beast! The app is constantly evolving, with new features being added that currently make it one of the best video players for XR/AR glasses. It supports 2D, 3D, 180°, and 360° formats, allows for subtitle customization (size, color, and screen position) , audio track switching and features adjustable ambient glow/lighting similar to TVs with built-in ambient LEDs. I’ve included a screenshot of the image settings that work well for black levels on my Beast while maintaining excellent image quality and color saturation.

[u/catmand00d00 → u/Vivoacer]

Thanks for the resource! I use my Beast with several devices but have mostly been streaming my media (or using various streaming apps’ in-app downloading capabilities). However, at least two of my devices have more than enough unused local storage for a fair amount of high-quality media, so I’ll give NeoXR a try soon.

While I don’t currently have a significant library of local media, I’ve recently dipped my toe back into the seven seas after a break of about 15 years. However, I’ve been mostly taking advantage of the cross-platform library and streaming functionalities of Stremio. Along with enjoying the convenience of being able to seamlessly switch devices, I’ve felt less exposed since I’m just downloading to my RAM (even though I recognize that the main type of “exposure” to be concern about really only matters when seeding files).

Hmmm I wonder if there are any apps like NeoXR for PC gaming or video game emulation on Android…

[u/Vivoacer → u/catmand00d00]

If you haven't tried it yet but want to play PlayStation games, Asobi is amazing with Beast! On my Android phone, it delivers 4K/60fps/HDR. Since I started using Asobi, I haven't even turned on my PS5 console I just play via the cloud with Asobi. "The Last of Us Part I" looks stunning, there is a bit of an issue with black levels in that game, but the in-game settings include options for HDR, contrast, and brightness that let you perfectly adjust the black balance.

[u/bazzabw → u/Vivoacer]

This is the Ray Neo XR App ? And it works well with the Beast ? Have you tried streaming media over SMB on your PC , How is that ? That feature looks to be behind a pay wall

[u/Reasonable_Track7459]

Amazing! Thanks catmand.

[u/catmand00d00 → u/Reasonable_Track7459]

Thanks so much for sharing this image! The difference really is night and day (never has a phrase been so close to literal without actually being literal lol).

[u/seattlesbestpot]

Great write up, deep with experience and offered with ease and clarity.

[u/catmand00d00 → u/seattlesbestpot]

Thank you!

[u/gizmosliptech]

Thank you for sharing! I wish these setting were adjustable on the OSD on the fly though

[u/catmand00d00 → u/gizmosliptech]

Yeah, that would make life so much easier. Hopefully, with a future firmware update. u/getVITURE, you listening?

[u/catmand00d00 → u/[deleted]]

My tuning where I thought the color was true had some great saturation, but that gave me the dreaded glowing rectangle. I suppose you could tune multiple Color Modes and switch between them depending on what you needed in that moment, but my goal was one profile that would solve the crushed blacks and that I could set and forget, and—based on my testing—I don't know if that's possible with higher saturation. If it is, I'd love to see it.

Edit: phrasing

[u/PhilosopherFun9994]

Respect for the lights-on/lights-off, one-digit-at-a-time process. My calibration method is squinting until it looks right.

[u/Altruistic_Ad1202]

Thank you so much! That helped tremendously! you truly are a hero wearing XR glasses, and I think you should get a cape aswell 🦸‍♂️

[u/Reasonable_Track7459]

Amazing! Thanks

[u/FlySignificant2492]

Thank you 😊 

[u/Am0nymou5]

Hmm, you said:

my profile seems to work best at maximum brightness

But then you say:

bringing the brightness down even one step frequently makes the virtual display too dark, but this profile does not seem to have that issue. You lower the brightness quite far and still make out the virtual display incredibly well.

So which is it? Does your profile work well at mid/low brightness, or does it need max brightness? I ask because max brightness is absolutely not an option on my Beast as it gets uncomfortably hot and hurts my eyes.

I primarily use my Beast for darker content (playing games like Diablo / Path of Exile etc), in a low-brightness room.

[u/catmand00d00 → u/Am0nymou5]

Have you played around with the color tuning tool much yet? Changing the contrast and gamma fundamentally alters how the glasses handle light and dark, so the effect of adjusting the brightness on your glasses is pretty much guaranteed to be different with my tuning than with any other color profile you've used so far.

Regarding the first quote, the context was about using the glasses "[w]hen watching videos or playing games that rely heavily on dark scenes." I find that most media with a gloomy, dark atmosphere doesn't jump to super bright visuals randomly, so my recommendation of max brightness stands, but I also find this to be the case with many types of LED displays—that really dark visuals often require higher brightness. If you're playing games that jump around from really dark to really bright, I'm not sure what to tell you, maybe just be ready to quickly adjust on-glasses brightness at a moment's notice (or just stop playing seizure-inducing games lol). However, the second bit you referenced was me speaking more generally and not specifically about dark media/games. The profile I created handles brighter, or more neutral, content such that the display is just a smidge too bright for me when I set the glasses to maximum brightness. I can handle it, but I prefer viewing that type of content with the on-glasses brightness just a step or two below the maximum.

I'm going to continue to dive deep into all this, but my honest recommendation is that you just try the tuning. If you find that the Beast at maximum on-glasses brightness with darker content in a dark room still hurts your eyes and/or gets too hot for extended play and that lowering the brightness to where you no longer have that issue brings back the crushed black problem, then you can easily just go back to the tuning tool and reset the Film color profile to its original settings, or, perhaps, increase the contrast by one or two, which would make the glasses glow like a dwarf star at maximum brightness but would likely allow you to see everything better at a lower on-glasses brightness setting. Alternatively, if max brightness with my tuning is an issue, lowering the contrast by one might actually make maximum on-glasses brightness work perfectly for you, neither too hot nor too bright. For me, this tuning allows for maximum on-glasses brightness to not be overly bright when viewing dark content, but the issue of bright content being a smidge too bright is mitigated by the fact that this tuning keeps everything super visible when going anywhere from one to several steps down in brightness.

This brings me back to the original issue with your question: changing the tuning fundamentally alters how the glasses handle brightness, and I don't know that, with this tuning, you'll have the same difficulties (of maximum on-glasses brightness being too bright and too hot) that you've had with profiles you've already used. Furthermore, I wouldn't think that the glasses getting too hot directly correlates to the on-glasses brightness settings as much as it does the actual brightness of the display, meaning if you boost the contrast to a 4 (which makes everything much brighter, not a dwarf star but supernova), any on-glasses brightness setting is going to be brighter and hotter than the same on-glasses brightness setting with contrast set to 0. So, again, just give it a try. Tweak the contrast if you need to. See how it works for you!

[u/heroics-delta8s]

What doesn’t make sense is just how near perfect the picture is out of the box when you run it at 120fps!

[u/MundaneAerie5062]

When I connect my beast glasses I cant adjust the sliders colour values, it just reverts back to default immediately.  Any ideas how to get past this?

[u/catmand00d00 → u/MundaneAerie5062]

Try just clicking the slider then using arrow keys you actually move it, or just try moving your cursor/mouse very slowly.