Pimax Announces Dream Air, a Compact VR Headset With One Totally Unique Feature

Totally agree on the need for bigger fov! But unfortunately, mass production of micro-oled displays at affordable cost is hard! For production they use equipment that's normally used and build for the semi-conductor industry. The wafers used have a limited size and producing bigger micro-oleds to get bigger fov's comes with fast increasing risk for production errors, faulty pixels, color inconsistenties etc and thus increasing costs substantially, that are already high with the current sized micro-oleds. It made Meta stepping away from plans to bring out a next quest pro with micro-oled displays in 2027. It would become too expensive and likely have an fov smaller than the quest 3, which would be a step back. Another reason not to go for bigger fov's is that a lot of pixels of your display will be assigned to the periphery of your vision, lowering the pixeldensity in the centre.
Still there are companies working on producing pancake lenses that can deliver a higher fov even with the small micro-oled displays we have now. Fingers crossed, there is still hope :))

TL;DR: High FoV microOLED displays aren't more difficult to produce than the currently available ones, as it only depends on the lenses, but with pancakes you have to choose between small HMD size and large FoV; companies go with 90°-100° because a higher FoV also requires a much higher rendering performance, which is sort of wasted on the least visible parts of the image when it is already challenging to render for a 4K display.

You can absolutely create a microOLED display with high FoV, because the FoV doesn't depend on the display, but the lenses. And you can also use pancake lenses to achieve a larger FoV.

Pancakes are basically just a set of consecutive lenses working together, causing less optical distortion than using just one lens with a more curved surface would, which is one of the limiting factors for achieving higher FoV. The ones in VR HMDs use internal reflection to significantly reduce the required distance between lens and displays, allowing for much slimmer headsets. You could use the set of lenses to achieve a higher, distortion free magnification instead, which would give you a larger FoV, but then you'd again need to make the lens-display distance larger, resulting in bulkier headsets.

You can basically use pancakes to either reduce the headset size or increase the FoV, but not both at the same time. And so far manufacturers go for the smaller size, which makes kind of sense with high resolution displays. Making the FoV larger isn't free, it comes with exponentially increasing render cost for the least important parts of the image. Most of the time we look forward because that's where our eyes are the sharpest, while the peripheral vision is seen at a much lower resolution and only very muddy. If something interesting pops up there, we check by moving our eyes and then turning our head for the clearest image.

Driving a 4K display already requires a lot of processing power even when limited to about 90°. Due to perspective distortion, adding a little bit of FoV requires rendering a lot more geometry in two screen directions that most users will never ever see, or only very fuzzy. Looking at a flat display with lenses causes extra distortion that make this even worse. So while we don't have clever ways to reduce the render load for the peripheral vision or start using dome shaped displays, it makes sense to throw all the compute power at the 90° that we can actually see somewhat sharp by moving our eyes.

TL;DR: unprocessed DP-in works for low FoV displays without a lot of tracking capabilities, but a VR HMD like the Dream Air will today come with some onboard processing for handling sensors and maybe even reprojecting a flat image coming from a phone for a proper display in VR.

The Rift S and WMR headsets got away with the PC doing all the tracking, connection several lores nIR cameras via USB through a rather thick and expensive cable. That gets less and less an option with more sensors on the headsets and higher resolution cameras for passthrough etc., and everyone trying to use standard (cheap) USB-C cables for transferring both video to and sensor data from the headset.

So nowadays you typically have some SoC onboard to both handle sensors and connect to the controllers as well as doing some tracking. The PSVR2 connects via USB-C with DP-Alt mode, contains a SoC that's smaller than the XR2 Gen 1 in Quest 2 and apparently manufactured by MediaTek for Sony. It communicates with controllers and haptics, apparently does (parts of) the controller, eye and now probably also hand tracking. It might integrate Tobii's EyeChip that's otherwise missing on the PSVR2 PCB, and also decodes the DP signal coming over two USB-C data lines. It also integrates a GPU and is capable of showing a video signal send from a regular source as a kind of virtual cinema screen, correctly projected inside VR with head tracking by itself, even when not connected to a PS5 or a PC with Sony's software.

Similarly the Dream Air will have to include some type of SoC that allows to connect several room/controller and eye tracking cameras, preprocess the data and send it to the PC, unless they go with a very thick cable or some solution like the Pimax fibre optics DP cable with merging lots of data lines at very high speed. DP-in alone isn't enough. And if you need compute on the HMD anyway, it makes most sense for it to also receive the DP signal and display it, like the PSVR2 does.

But creating a custom SoC isn't exactly cheap, so headsets selling in low numbers will very likely go with one of Qualcomm's existing XR chips instead, which unfortunately all lack the option to receive DP and pass it to their integrated GPU. Connecting a phone directly works on the XReal etc. because these are basically just low FoV displays without lenses that would adding geometric distortion, most of them including only 3DoF tracking from a IMU or no tracking at all, and none doing any type of internal reprojection. The Dream Air offering inside-out and eye tracking means there are at least six additional cameras involved. And the use of lenses and a larger FoV requires that any rectangular view coming from a phone will have to be re-projected by a GPU to again look flat inside the HMD, a task that for Rift S or the Pico 3 Neo Link with DP-in the connected PC was expected to do before sending the digital video signal to the HMD.