You might remember the Pimax Crystal Super, a VR headset with swappable
optical engines. Well, guess what? They've got a new one that runs two
micro-OLED displays at 3840 by 3552
for each eye. Absolutely incredible, but
the star of the show isn't the new engine going on the old headset, it's
their new headset. This is the Dream
Air. It uses the same optical engine that you just saw in this thing except
the whole headset is smaller than that alone. Obviously, competition is heating
up in the VR space, but Pimax has taken a balanced approach that they think is
going to make their customers extremely happy. So, it's lightweight targeting
less than 170 g, but they aren't trying to be the lightest weight. So, you're
still going to get features like motorized IPD adjustment as well as
magnetic lens inserts for those folks out there who need a prescription.
They've got two fans, one per display for ample cooling, as well as four
integrated cameras that handle inside-out tracking as well as black and
white passthrough. With that said, this is not meant to be a standalone headset.
It's meant to target maximum clarity for PC VR, which to them still means having
an attached cable. With that in mind, it does use display stream compression in
order to hit the maximum refresh rate of up to 90 Hz at that crazy resolution,
but it's worth noting that the displays are running at that native res. There's
no funky upscaling happening within the headset itself. With all of that said, I
think the biggest difference maker to image quality is going to be the lenses.
This is Pimax's first-ever headset to use pancake-style optics, and these are
not just any pancakes. They're concave pancake lenses like you might find on
the Apple Vision Pro. This has a couple of key benefits. It helps them keep the
field of view reasonably wide. They're aiming for about 110° and way more
importantly, it should help significantly reduce the flaring or
bloom that you can get around bright objects with other pancake optic
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
that until I tell you about our sponsor.
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All right. Now that we've got it powered up, is a perfect time to show you guys,
and I'll have to use my cell phone camera for this, the 10 infrared lights
per eye for Tobii eye tracking. This can
be used for social applications, but also for foveated rendering. We're not
using that today for this particular demo, but that's to help make these
a little easier for your poor GPU to drive.
Oh, by the way, one other benefit of the
concave lenses that I didn't mention before is that if you have long
eyelashes, then it makes them less likely to brush
on the inside of your lenses, which wow.
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
resistance because they're kind of sweeping I don't I don't know. It's hard
to describe, but I can feel wind inside when I blink. Anyway, uh oh, I never
checked to see how this tightens. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
A little more. A little more. Give me a little more. Yeah.
Oh, so you got to buy it now. They're still working on the thickness of the
gasket. I like to really get my eyes right up against the lenses, so they're
actually probably going to dial that back a little bit, and then hopefully it
won't pop out when you try to tighten it. While we're sitting on the carrier
is a good time to evaluate general clarity, which
damn. Not bad.
You've got to love that OLED sharpness.
I mean, it's still sample and hold, right? So, you're going to get a little bit of natural blur, but man, like
reading gauges, reading buttons,
holy crap, is that ever cool? And I got to say, the improvements to
glare really impressive. Without doing a
side-by-side comparison, it would be hard to say for sure, but these are
definitely among the better lenses that I've seen for
glare. What are you guys rating the brightness of this thing at? Hold on, let me guess.
Let me guess. Pancakes, OLED, but with
external power, 120 nits. Okay, it's
somewhere in between 100 and 150. Okay, so I guess I'm not super far off.
Okay, time to grab the stick and the throttle. You guys are going to launch me off of this thing, right?
>> Yes, we are. >> Okay, cool. >> Have a nice flight, sir. All right, see you later, buddies.
Woo! All right, here we go. Heck, yeah.
There you go. Beauty. Woo!
All right, there's no way I'm going to land this. >> this. >> Nope, I don't.
Woo! You should get in the pod, right? No.
Definitely not. Definitely not.
While I wasn't able to evaluate the quality of the speakers here on the show floor, you know how it is, one benefit
that I'm really liking is the split cable. So, it does DisplayPort on one
side and then other data on the other side. Basically, with a lighter headset,
you run into issues sometimes where if you've got the cable on the one side, it
can really significantly pull the headset. This helps to alleviate that.
For the interface, they're using standard USB-C, which is nice, and
that's not the only USB-C port on here.
Okay, it's a smaller headset. It's a little less modular than Pimax's
traditionally are, but you still get a USB Type-C port right here in the middle
of the headset for accessories, as well as these two little threaded holes.
These are because Pimax recognizes not everybody wants this strap style of head
mount. So, these are anchor points for them to do a halo style where you could
just take the face gasket off and have it be flip up and flip downable in front
of your eyes. They're also currently developing an automatically tensioning
strap as well as a more deluxe audio strap. One potentially awkward topic was
what Pimax is going to do now that Valve has discontinued the base stations that
lighthouse tracking relies on. Many of their headsets use this, and it turns
out they've got a pretty simple answer. For their modular headsets, they're
going to have a lighthouse version for the front plate or a slam version for
the front plate that has cameras for inside-out tracking, and then for the
Air, they're just going to have two separate versions. The one I'm holding
and the one this guy's wearing.
See, look, Ma, no cameras. And look me, no continuation of this
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