Why I'm Excited About the Pimax Dream Air

I’m a sim racer and amateur racer with a passion for Motorsport, good racecraft and the technical and setup aspect of sim racing.

Featured Image: Pimax Dream Air VR Headset

I’ve been running my Crystal Super as the daily for nearly a year. It’s the best PCVR picture I’ve used in iRacing, but on a 90-minute LMU stint at Spa I can feel every gram of it by the time I’m into the second hour.

So, when Pimax announced a sub-170g headset using the same Sony micro-OLED panels and the same ConcaveView lenses it was potentially pretty exciting step forward for us sim racers. I haven’t tested the Dream Air yet – this is a preview, written off the back of some sim-racing-focused research hands-on by SimRacing Arnout, a longer two-week test by VR ManCave, and the shipping article RoadtoVR ran in January.

Check out the latest reviews on the Pimax site here, or read on:

The reason I’m excited isn’t the spec sheet on its own. It’s that the Dream Air’s spec sheet is exactly what I’ve been wishing for after every long race night.

The pitch:

The Dream Air is Pimax’s first thin-and-light PCVR headset. Sony micro-OLED panels at 3,840 × 3,552 per eye, 90Hz, through Pimax’s ConcaveView pancake lenses, 110° horizontal FOV. Vendor weight is under 170g, and VR ManCave weighed his at 170g flat, pointing out his iPhone is heavier.

The part that matters: the panels and lenses are the same ones that ship in the Crystal Super Micro-OLED. So whatever I think of the Crystal Super’s picture (and I’ve written a long review about that) is approximately what I should expect from the Dream Air’s picture. That’s a useful baseline.

It’s been shipping in small batches since January with a temporary 2D fabric strap – the proper 3D strap will follow free of charge for early customers. Pricing is $1,999 for the Lighthouse version, $2,299 for the SLAM version, with a $95 surcharge in the US.

Loading products...

What I’m Excited About

The weight finally hits an endurance-friendly number

The weight of teh Pimax Dream Air is 170g. I read that and assumed Pimax had given up on micro-OLED and gone for an LCD panel like the Big Screen Beyond. They haven’t. By Arnout’s reckoning my Crystal Super is roughly five times heavier and twice the volume – and I believe him because I can feel the difference between the Crystal Super and my Crystal Light at the start of every race, never mind the end of one. For me, weight has always been the trade-off I made for the better picture. If the Dream Air has actually solved that without compromising the panel – and the early hands-on suggests it has, with the usual “in their hands, on their face” caveat – then the maths for a long race night is different to what it was.

The narrower FOV is, weirdly, the upside

The Dream Air’s HFOV is 110° which is lower than the Crystal Super’s ultrawide variant, and that’s a bit of a cost in peripheral vision, which I’ll come back to. But, because it’s narrower, it renders fewer pixels: VR ManCave measured roughly 30% fewer in SteamVR than his Crystal Super Micro-OLED. Arnout makes the same point from the racer’s seat. He can crank the resolution closer to native and still hold steady frame times.

For the kind of racing where you need 90Hz to stay locked – night traffic in iRacing, contact-heavy LMU stints – that’s actual, not theoretical headroom. Every spec compromise I make on my Crystal Super in iRacing (documented in my pimax settings guide) is GPU-side. The Dream Air would let me give some of those settings back.

Lighthouse is the version a sim racer probably wants

Both Arnout and Sebastian Ang at MRTV land on Lighthouse over SLAM. Arnout’s reasoning is comfort with the setup he already runs – he reports zero experiential difference between Lighthouse on the Dream Air and inside-out tracking on his Crystal Super. MRTV’s reasoning is more subtle: the Lighthouse version benefits from the SBOS3 SteamVR-native driver, which means smart smoothing works, which means more performance headroom. The SLAM version doesn’t have that yet.

For me, sitting in the same cockpit every session, two base stations once installed are a non-issue. I’d take the Lighthouse version.

Eye tracking might pull mid-range GPUs back into the picture

VR ManCave’s RTX 3070 / 5800X test rig managed full resolution with eye-tracked Quad Views and FSR. I want to be careful with this one – it’s a single test rig, single configuration, and “managed” doesn’t tell us about the worst-case stutters in a full grid start. But if the eye tracking does what he reports it does, the price-of-entry GPU for high-end PCVR sim racing may have dropped a tier.

What I’m Watching For

Endurance comfort is the thing I’d like to properly test

This is where I’m a little stuck. Arnout did an hour, got real forehead pressure, and put it down to face shape – “too small for my big Dutch forehead.” VR ManCave ran his for two weeks and finds the current interface “quite decent”. They’ve reviewed the same hardware and reached different answers, because they have different faces (?!)

Nobody has done a 4-hour endurance live-stream on a Dream Air at the time I’m writing this. That’s a case that matters most for me, and I can’t borrow somebody else’s face shape to find out. The shipping interface and 2D strap aren’t the final hardware – the 3D strap is promised free to early pre-orders, and “we’ll send the proper strap when it’s ready” is a fair caveat for a $1,999 headset, but it does mean the comfort verdict is provisional until that strap arrives. Remember that the Quest 3’s strap was/is painfully dire – so this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the strap as an afterthought.

Pimax’s late-April package decision

MRTV flagged in a recent video that new orders will no longer include the originally-advertised ringless controllers (SLAM version) or the upgraded 3D strap. Existing pre-orders honoured. New buyers: same price, less in the box. If you wanted the Lighthouse version anyway, it doesn’t change much for you. If you were buying the SLAM specifically for the controllers Pimax demoed at CES, you’d want to read the small print before clicking through.

The narrower FOV at the edges

Arnout calls it “on the edge of acceptable” for him, and the testHMD measurement of 110° H / 90° V from VR ManCave confirms it’s narrower than the Crystal Super’s ultrawide. Whether that costs me peripheral mirror pickup at racing seat distance, or whether the centre clarity is enough that I don’t notice – that’s the part I genuinely won’t know until I drive one.

How It Compares to What I’m Running

The Crystal Super stays the picture-quality reference. The Crystal Light is the lighter option in the Pimax lineup when I want refresh-rate flexibility. The full lineup is in the Pimax buyer’s guide. The Dream Air, on paper, would slot in as the long-stint endurance option – the Pimax I’d reach for on a 90-minute LMU race or a 4-hour iRacing series, assuming the comfort holds up for me. If it doesn’t, I keep my Crystal Super and move on.

What’s Next

We’ll get one on the rig as soon as we can. The plan is a proper review against the Crystal Super, at least one full endurance race, and the Lighthouse plus SBOS3 driver path tested end to end. For now, I’m watching this one, and teh reviews on the Pimax website.