The Pimax Dream Air headset represents a new area of focus for the company. While most of its headsets up to this point have been necessarily bulky to achieve their signature large field-of-view, the Dream Air aims to make a headset that’s compact but still feature-rich. One of those features—a headstrap that automatically tightens—would be an industry first.

Priced at $1,900 and purportedly shipping in May 2025, Pimax’s Dream Air headset aims to take on an emerging segment of compact high-end PC VR headsets like Bigscreen Beyond and the Shiftall MaganeX Superlight.

Image courtesy Pimax

But it wouldn’t be Pimax if it didn’t make additional ambitious promises which risk pulling the company’s attention away from delivering its products on time and as promised. For the Dream Air, that additional promise is an optional compute puck which the headset can plug into to become a standalone VR headset. The company is calling the puck ‘Cobb’, and says it will include a Snapdragon XR2 chip and battery. Oh, and don’t forget the optional SteamVR Tracking faceplate.

Speaking of pulling the company’s attention… the announcement of the Dream Air continues Pimax’s trend of revealing new products before delivering on those it has previously announced. The company’s Crystal Super headset was announced back in April 2024 and originally planned for a Q4 2024 release, but is now said to be releasing sometime in Q1 2025.

As for the Dream Air, it will purportedly be compact and also full of a wishlist of specs and features:

  • Weight of 200g
  • Resolution: 13MP (3,840 × 3,552) micro-OLED per-eye @ 90Hz and “HDR”
  • 102° field-of-view
  • Inside-out tracking
  • Motion controllers & hand-tracking
  • On-board audio
  • Optional prescription lenses
  • Eye-tracking
  • Automatic IPD and automatic strap tightening
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That last one—automatic strap tightening—is a feature that hasn’t been included in any major headset to date. It’s an interesting idea considering the challenge of fitting a headset comfortably; many users want to crank their headset tight to their face so it won’t move, but the most comfortable way to use a headset is to balance tightness with stability.

The design of the auto-tightening strap also looks carefully considered. While we’ve only seen renders so far, it appears the tightening mechanism is hidden under fabric, making the tightening of the headstrap looks like it’s simply shrinking in place.

If the headset could effectively dial in the ideal tightness, it would be a boon for many users. Dream Air also has automatic IPD adjustment, which sets the distance between the lenses to match the user’s eye width (something most people also aren’t good at doing manually).

While it remains to be seen if Pimax can deliver something as svelte as promised, for now it looks like the company is flexing an industrial design muscle that’s been largely hidden by the utilitarian and boxy style of its previous headsets.

Image courtesy Pimax

However, Pimax isn’t giving up those boxy designs of yore. The company says that a compact headset is a new area of focus for the company, but it will continue developing its larger and wider field-of-view headsets.

Pimax is already taking pre-orders for the Dream Air, with a price of $1,900 and an expected release date of May 2025.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • guest

    They are better known in China and for apps that require wide FOV

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    The resolution of 3840*3552 matches the MeganeX Superlight 8K (3552*3840, rotated by 90°?) Other display specs also match (90Hz, HDR/10bit), so both very likely use the same microOLED displays. Both HMDs are priced at USD 1900, but for that Pimax includes motion controllers, integrated audio, eye and inside-out tracking, all missing/adding extra cost on the MeganeX (with a flip-up display, adjustable diopter and eye relieve).

    For years the MeganeX with many prototypes and missed shipping dates seemed vaporware, but 2024 they both massively increased resolution and started taking (pre-)orders. Pimax still isn't a beacon of shipping reliability, but the Pimax Crystal came with all (?) the promised features incl. eye tracking and onboard XR2, and seems to be a great HMD.

    The probable reason is availability of standard components. In the past a new HMD kind of required starting from scratch. Now companies have access to 3rd party microOLED displays, pancake lenses, Android with OpenXR stacks, XR2 SoC also usable for streaming, lores nIR tracking cameras connecting to the XR2's CSI ports, and hand tracking software using them. So creating a new HMD has become much easier.

    This could mean that more technically similar HMDs will appear soon, maybe from startups that, following the AVP release hype, collected venture capital from investors suddenly wanting to jump into high end/price productivity XR. The effect could be reduced prices and headsets for more diverse use cases to set them apart. As usual, a market with actual competition should be good for users.

    • Dragon Marble

      Competition doesn't always benefit the users. For example, would you rather have Google Earth available on Quest and Vision Pro as well, or would you prefer Google keeping it for itself as a competitive edge? There are many other examples where the users would've benefited more if the companies had cooperated instead.

      As to these smaller headset makers, they are actually competing to make themselves better instead of sabotaging each other. Even in this space, however, I would rather have a big player consolidate the high-end PCVR market so that we can have proper support behind the headset in order to turn good ideas into a great product.

      Bigscreen, Pimax, MeganeX. There's something I really like about each. But most likely I won't buy any.

  • Jaap Grolleman

    Hey man, we have loads of satisfied users across a huge range of headsets, across now 9 years. Our previous headsets are very popular among simmers and not always feature that prominently on VR media.

    • Hi Jaap, this is an ambitious and very interesting announcement. Can you comment on whether or not there exists a functional prototype and if so why it was not shown during this video announcement instead of a simple black 3D printed model?

    • Alrighty ….

      Thanks for responding.

  • Michael Speth

    "Auto-tighting" is a disaster waiting to happen. How many people are going to get injured before this product is pulled?

    PSVR2 implemented the ideal strap solution including the best way to tighten it – using a wheel. Pixmax can't even get their current projects correct let alone this feature which is a death trap waiting to happen.

  • We all felt the need of the announcement of ANOTHER Pimax headset lol. It seems they can't live without announcing a new device every two months :). Anyway, I'm curious about this headset, I would like to try the auto-tightening feature.