Its simple. Robin wakes up in the morning with a new idea and we go from there
Joke aside…
Pimax, just like every other VR company, is monitoring the industry, analyzing the market and its demands. We also listen very closely to our customers and the entire VR community. Tying to figure out what people want to see next and what would make them to upgrade from their current VR setup.
Also, the decision making many times comes down to available technology that is accesible for a reasonable price. We can always stive to innovate with new hardware and features, but to make it reality we need all the components to be available and not too expensive.
For instance, our audience have been waiting for OLED panels for many years, ever since HTC Vive days basically. But not until recently, when the new SONY Micro-OLED panels became accessible, did Pimax decide to go OLED. Earlier OLED and Micro-OLED panels were just not good enough, according to Robin.
Also, to develop a Micro-OLED headset, we obviously had to use pancake lenses, which were pretty underwhelming the past few years. Thats why the development of the ConcaveView lenses became so fundamental for Pimax, finally being able to pair proper lenses with Micro-OLED panels, without too big compromisies. These new lenses were probably the deciding factor that lead us to invest in this next generation including Dream Air and Super Micro-OLED.
Wide FOV is still our goal, but we are also very limited by todays technology to create that wide FOV headset. There are no afordable high-end high-resolution OLED panels with 16:9 aspect ratio currently, that could allow us to reach 150-200 HFOV and meanwhile keeping the same level of PPD and clarity. And even if we dont go OLED, we still need to wait for the DisplayPort 2.1 standard to catch up and become accessible (and affordable) before we can finally release that QLED 12K.
Hi Vera! When developing VR, there is always that endless pursuit of providing a greater immersion, that perfect realism with crazy visuals and optimal performance. We have in fact come pretty far by now, with retina-level resolutions and clarity, with crystal clear optics, eye tracking and near flawless interaction. But there is a lot of room for improvements in all criterias, until VR reaches a certain level of perfection, especially for serious enthusiast.
We still have a long way to go to cover the full human field of view in VR. We are still far away from using verifocal VR lenses that creates that realistic life-like depth perception in the rendered VR view. We are still not using true HDR in VR which will dramatically change the way VR games are visually percieved. There are so many things!
Playing in VR is so different compared to playing on a monitor or TV. Its basically a virtual way of stepping into an “another reality”. And although I think the expereince will never reach complete perfection, we can for sure continue innovating, making the experience vastly better and more convincing for the big majority of people.
And thats the core driving force, I believe. That vision we have of one day stepping into a perfect virtual reality. It may be an endless task to get there, but every achievement we succeed in is so obvious and so rewarding. Like nothing else.
Hey Martin, I recently picked up the Crystal Super 50PPD, and I’ve been following your videos for a while now.
I’ve been wondering—how much further do you think VR optics can realistically improve? Or are we starting to reach the limits of what’s possible?
Also, where do you see the overlap between mixed reality and VR heading in the next few years? Do you think they’ll become more integrated?
And finally, do you think VR’s future will be defined by open ecosystems like Meta’s Quest or Steam, or more by closed platforms like PlayStation VR and Apple? Or will it be a mix of both?
Optics in VR have changed significantly over the year. We have fresnel lenses, then he industry largely shifted toward either aspheric or pancake lenses as the screens themselves became less of a bottleneck and lenses were the big thing, being able to resolve the full clarity of the image. Pimax has recently started investing heavily into pancake optics via the likes of the Dream Air line and most of the high end right now appears to be focusing primarily on pancake optics+microOLED as the sizes of those screens makes them a requirement. Do you think pancake optics will continue to be the way forward and it’ will be mainly about improving the issues they currently have, such as light efficiency, or do you think that it might just be somewhat of a stop gap in the long term for some other type of lens to replace it? Not too long ago meta had a prototype with incredibly small FoV, but it managed to hit incredible levels of brightness that people found really appealing.
In a similar vein of optics and trying to optimize them. Is getting extremely wide FoV a major issue with pancake optics and do you think something like a large and easier to work with LCD panel with pancakes to hit huge FoV would have a place? There have been several prototypes shown at various shows with this concept, but as of yet nobody has actually shown a comercial product which uses it. Makes me wonder how much the move toward pancakes is because of a belief they are simply better and how much is them being a necessity to hit the ultra small form factors the industry is chasing using such tin panels. Or perhaps it’s just cost prohibitive to make pancake optics that’d be big enough to do this?
We’ve certainly hit the point where higher resolution feels well into diminishing returns and other aspects(I.e FoV or HDR, which always seems further and further off) would be better prioritized.
Re eye tracking and DFR. Very important technology for VR. Using RTX 5090 here which can easily struggle with certain applications in high resolution headsets.
Found Pimax’s implementation on the original Crystal very effective, the Tobii 120hz eye trackers and Pimax Play injector working very well in my favorite Open VR DX 11 games set to ‘quality’ it’s seamless my eyes can’t seem to trick it.
Lets me run something lighter like Aircar at 100% render resolution and 90hz yet apply x1.3 resolution and max game settings in Unreal Engine looks absolutely stunning, everything has a liquidity
Also found it improved my optical comfort with the aspherical lenses, from what is effectively a dynamic pupil.
Calibration is simple, the vertical alignment indicator a useful fitting tool when donning the headset, didn’t find the auto ipd useful but I’m using a non stock face cushion which changed the eye relief distance.
I mostly use VR for flight sims and racing. Recently my OG Crystal stopped working and I ordered a Crystal Super Ultrawide to replace it. While waiting for my new headset to ship, I have been using my wife’s Quest 3.
I have now become very reliant on the relatively high quality passthrough. I had thought the way I was going to use it would be to draw a mask around my physical cockpit to see my real controls, buttons and switches. Jaap posted a video showing this on the Pimax Youtube channel called “The Science Behind SLAM Tracking in VR headsets” at time 0:51. However, it turns out I find it much better to use the Quest 3 hand tracking combined with Virtual Desktop Streamer, which allows you to project a circle of passthrough over each hand. This way, wherever your hands go, the passthrough goes too, and you can immediately reach the switch you want in the real world with the minimum of immersion breaking. This is also great when your switches don’t exactly match their position in the virtual cockpit.
Pimax has a hand tracking module, although the Accessories page in the Pimax store doesn’t say which headset this is compatible with, and it is currently out of stock.
Jaap shows an example of hand tracking in the same video I referenced above at time 4:20, which doesn’t appear to require the hand tracking module at all.
Also the MR Faceplate has been “in the works” for quite some time, to give us high quality passthrough.
Would it be possible to have options in Pimax play to combine all these technologies so that you could choose to either outline your cockpit with a mask or use hand tracking to move smaller passthrough circles wherever you hands go so you can move switches, type on the keyboard, or check your phone as can be done now with Virtual Desktop Streamer and the Quest 3?
Also, if / when introduced, will these innovations all be available on the Crystal Super?
There is a lot of hardware talk here but it’s the software that really will decide the future of VR. And I’m not seeing the big AAA games coming to VR. Personally I’m using VR mods as a workaround but that’s not what I want to play with a 2000€ headset. If the industry can’t be motivated to produce for VR it will stay in its niche or will die. Do you see any light in this case?
This has been shelved this year for the to me being. However we are much closer than. Now this is a a true micro OLED or maybe should be called something smaller
Pimax has come along way since the Pimax 4k released in 2016 and the 8k originally announced Jan 2017 and then Kickstarter for the 5k & 8k WFoV headsets in Sept 2017. Inspired by StarVR. Except pimax wanted to bring it to the masses.
We did have some early innovators like AntVR, FoveVR & OSVR. SulonQ the first pcvr headset using a full AMD APU as a Standalone.
Even prior to Meta there was some early Android headsets using a fork from Android 4.4 & 5 1( like headset Magicsee M1). Some ideas just too soon
Interestinglt before WMR their was a Windows endorsed headset from 3glasses - Burbur S1 iirc it had 2.5k QHD screen
