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You might remember the Pimax Crystal Super, a VR headset with swappable

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optical engines. Well, guess what? They've got a new one that runs two

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micro-OLED displays at 3840 by 3552

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for each eye. Absolutely incredible, but

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the star of the show isn't the new engine going on the old headset, it's

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their new headset. This is the Dream

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Air. It uses the same optical engine that you just saw in this thing except

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the whole headset is smaller than that alone. Obviously, competition is heating

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up in the VR space, but Pimax has taken a balanced approach that they think is

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going to make their customers extremely happy. So, it's lightweight targeting

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less than 170 g, but they aren't trying to be the lightest weight. So, you're

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still going to get features like motorized IPD adjustment as well as

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magnetic lens inserts for those folks out there who need a prescription.

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They've got two fans, one per display for ample cooling, as well as four

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integrated cameras that handle inside-out tracking as well as black and

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white passthrough. With that said, this is not meant to be a standalone headset.

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It's meant to target maximum clarity for PC VR, which to them still means having

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an attached cable. With that in mind, it does use display stream compression in

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order to hit the maximum refresh rate of up to 90 Hz at that crazy resolution,

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but it's worth noting that the displays are running at that native res. There's

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no funky upscaling happening within the headset itself. With all of that said, I

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think the biggest difference maker to image quality is going to be the lenses.

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This is Pimax's first-ever headset to use pancake-style optics, and these are

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not just any pancakes. They're concave pancake lenses like you might find on

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the Apple Vision Pro. This has a couple of key benefits. It helps them keep the

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field of view reasonably wide. They're aiming for about 110° and way more

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importantly, it should help significantly reduce the flaring or

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bloom that you can get around bright objects with other pancake optic

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systems. Of course, I'm not going to take their word for that. I'm going to have to try it, but I'm not going to do

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that until I tell you about our sponsor.

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All right, Linus forgot to do the sponsor spot, and that means now I have to well, I'm at a hockey game. But, you

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know what? Thanks to Dbrand for sponsoring this video because our sponsor dropped out. Dbrand sells cases,

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screen protectors, skins, and you know what? Sometimes they're all right. So,

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go to emergencysponsor.com and get some of them for me. Please.

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Please. Please. Please. Please. Will you buy some from Dbrand? Please. Please.

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All right. Now that we've got it powered up, is a perfect time to show you guys,

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and I'll have to use my cell phone camera for this, the 10 infrared lights

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per eye for Tobii eye tracking. This can

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be used for social applications, but also for foveated rendering. We're not

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using that today for this particular demo, but that's to help make these

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a little easier for your poor GPU to drive.

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Oh, by the way, one other benefit of the

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concave lenses that I didn't mention before is that if you have long

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eyelashes, then it makes them less likely to brush

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on the inside of your lenses, which wow.

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It's kind of nice, although there's kind of a funny effect I've never felt before. There's a little bit of like air

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resistance because they're kind of sweeping I don't I don't know. It's hard

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to describe, but I can feel wind inside when I blink. Anyway, uh oh, I never

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checked to see how this tightens. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

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A little more. A little more. Give me a little more. Yeah.

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Oh, so you got to buy it now. They're still working on the thickness of the

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gasket. I like to really get my eyes right up against the lenses, so they're

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actually probably going to dial that back a little bit, and then hopefully it

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won't pop out when you try to tighten it. While we're sitting on the carrier

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is a good time to evaluate general clarity, which

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damn. Not bad.

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You've got to love that OLED sharpness.

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I mean, it's still sample and hold, right? So, you're going to get a little bit of natural blur, but man, like

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reading gauges, reading buttons,

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holy crap, is that ever cool? And I got to say, the improvements to

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glare really impressive. Without doing a

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side-by-side comparison, it would be hard to say for sure, but these are

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definitely among the better lenses that I've seen for

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glare. What are you guys rating the brightness of this thing at? Hold on, let me guess.

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Let me guess. Pancakes, OLED, but with

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external power, 120 nits. Okay, it's

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somewhere in between 100 and 150. Okay, so I guess I'm not super far off.

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Okay, time to grab the stick and the throttle. You guys are going to launch me off of this thing, right?

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>> Yes, we are. >> Okay, cool. >> Have a nice flight, sir. All right, see you later, buddies.

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Woo! All right, here we go. Heck, yeah.

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There you go. Beauty. Woo!

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All right, there's no way I'm going to land this. >> this. >> Nope, I don't.

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Woo! You should get in the pod, right? No.

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Definitely not. Definitely not.

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While I wasn't able to evaluate the quality of the speakers here on the show floor, you know how it is, one benefit

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that I'm really liking is the split cable. So, it does DisplayPort on one

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side and then other data on the other side. Basically, with a lighter headset,

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you run into issues sometimes where if you've got the cable on the one side, it

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can really significantly pull the headset. This helps to alleviate that.

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For the interface, they're using standard USB-C, which is nice, and

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that's not the only USB-C port on here.

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Okay, it's a smaller headset. It's a little less modular than Pimax's

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traditionally are, but you still get a USB Type-C port right here in the middle

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of the headset for accessories, as well as these two little threaded holes.

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These are because Pimax recognizes not everybody wants this strap style of head

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mount. So, these are anchor points for them to do a halo style where you could

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just take the face gasket off and have it be flip up and flip downable in front

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of your eyes. They're also currently developing an automatically tensioning

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strap as well as a more deluxe audio strap. One potentially awkward topic was

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what Pimax is going to do now that Valve has discontinued the base stations that

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lighthouse tracking relies on. Many of their headsets use this, and it turns

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out they've got a pretty simple answer. For their modular headsets, they're

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going to have a lighthouse version for the front plate or a slam version for

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the front plate that has cameras for inside-out tracking, and then for the

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Air, they're just going to have two separate versions. The one I'm holding

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and the one this guy's wearing.

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See, look, Ma, no cameras. And look me, no continuation of this

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video. Subscribe to ShortCircuit.