I wanted to share my initial impressions of the Dream Air from the perspective of a longtime VR and flight/racing sim enthusiast.

I’ve owned a bunch of headsets over the years, including the original Oculus DK1, Oculus CV1, Valve Index, a Pimax 5k I quickly returned, Quest 3, and now the Dream Air. I held onto my Index for a long, long time because I was huffing copium that Valve would eventually release a worthy successor for enthusiasts, but the Steam Frame does not look like a compelling upgrade from my Quest 3.

What I wanted was pretty specific: OLED panels, higher resolution, a wired connection for uncompressed visuals, and, as annoying as base stations can be, the ability to use my Knuckles controllers and Vive trackers again. I am absolutely babying those things.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my purchase, though I’m still evaluating whether it’s worth the price I paid. I found the Dream Air at an online retailer, only had to wait a couple of days for it to arrive, and have a 30-day return window, so I’d recommend shopping around before ordering directly from Pimax.

I’ll get the negatives out of the way first, because they are real.

The negatives

1. Price and value

This is hard to quantify broadly. I’ve invested heavily in this hobby over many years, and the value proposition changes dramatically depending on your own circumstances. Still, out of the box, this really does not feel like a $2,000 product to me.

I’d have a hard time recommending it to someone who is not already very sure that they want this exact kind of headset, especially if they need the more expensive SLAM version. This is an enthusiast product with enthusiast compromises, not a polished mass-market device.

2. Build quality and comfort

The quality of the internal hardware seems solid, but the facial interface, speakers, and head strap feel like complete afterthoughts.

I don’t really understand why Pimax even needed to include the little onboard speakers if space and weight savings were such a priority. They sound tinny, and I would much rather have had a standard 3.5mm audio jack or a proper DMAS head strap, which I believe is supposed to be available soon?

The stock facial interface is pretty uncomfortable for me, although I am finding ways to deal with it. I have a StudioForm gasket coming in the mail, and to be fair, it’s not like the Quest’s default strap and facial interface are much better, so I won’t ding Pimax too hard there.

Where I absolutely will ding them is the split cable design and the placement of the junction box. I had a miserable time during the first day or two trying to figure out how to route the cable comfortably. Eventually I found a decent solution: I used the Velcro strips to attach the cables to the higher rear strap so they come up and fall off the back of my head more like a ponytail instead of getting caught on my neck and shoulders. That made the headset a lot more usable.

My ears also make contact with the sharp metal connection point for the head strap, which is pretty annoying. I’ll probably wrap that area with some light foam padding eventually.

Also, why is the USB port inaccessible with the stock gasket? I use headphones, and not being able to plug them directly into the headset with a short cable is annoying. The StudioForm gasket will fix this too, but it feels silly that I need an aftermarket solution for something so basic.

Seriously, Pimax: lose the tinny onboard sound and give us a proper audio solution or a normal headphone jack. I'd be shocked to know people who buy something like this are sticking with the default audio.

3. Sweet spot and FOV

This one is subjective because everyone’s face is different, but I’m struggling a bit with reading text that is not directly in front of me.

Once the headset is positioned perfectly, it’s okay, but I notice halation and blur falling off pretty quickly when I glance from side to side. Coming from the Quest 3, this was jarring. The Quest has true edge-to-edge sharpness in a way that makes glancing down at dials and instruments much easier.

The FOV is not as bad as I initially feared. Horizontally, it feels a little bit wider than the Quest 3 to me, but it is also noticeably shorter vertically. I think the new gasket may help a little, but I can already see the edges of the panels where it sits currently, so maybe not. At times, coming from the Quest 3, it almost feels like looking through a letterbox because the vertical FOV is reduced enough that I can see the top and bottom edges of the screens. It is not constantly distracting, but it is definitely noticeable.

I am also seeing some weirdness with binocular overlap. For instance, if I glance fully to the left, my right eye’s vision almost completely disappears. I have a large head and a fairly wide IPD of 69mm, so it may just be that this headset is a little too small for my face. Your mileage may vary.

The positives

1. Panels and resolution

I am so thrilled to use an OLED panel again.

Playing Half-Life: Alyx on this thing is legitimately terrifying. The image is remarkably sharp, and there is virtually no screen-door effect at all. It really is a beautiful picture.

In most games, I’ve already started learning to ignore the slightly out-of-focus areas of the lenses because I get so pulled into the immersion. My main flatscreen monitor is an LG OLED TV, so I’m pretty accustomed to OLED, but the colors in the Dream Air still pop wonderfully.

I really, really hate LCD panels for gaming. Every time I jumped into a space game like Elite Dangerous on an LCD headset, the thought of "I sure wish space was actually black” lived rent-free in my head. On the Dream Air, space is finally black again.

That said, 4K per eye takes a hell of a GPU to run. I have an RTX 4090 and an i9-13900K, and I am still feeling the struggle a bit. I suspect foveated rendering is going to help a lot, but I have not fully figured that out yet. I would really like to not have to buy a 5090, but that may end up being the next big-ticket item after my wallet recovers.

2. Weight

I have a crappy neck, so the weight was a big selling point for me.

I would not say I forget I’m wearing a headset, but it feels much more like wearing swimming goggles than wearing a helmet. Quickly moving my head results in basically zero sway, which is a huge plus for immersion. The light weight is one of the Dream Air’s biggest strengths.

3. Tracking and the lighthouse ecosystem

My cockpit is on a 4DOF motion rig, and I absolutely hate relying on a glitchy little Witmotion IMU for motion compensation. Base stations and Vive trackers work much better for that use case, although I am still dealing with some vibration issues that I’m working on through software filtering and physical damping.

Managing base stations without a Valve headset is annoying because they do not automatically turn off when you close SteamVR, but I’m fixing that by plugging them into smart plugs I can control with my voice or phone.

I know the industry has largely moved away from base stations, and I think the SLAM version is probably going to make more sense for most people. But I still have a soft spot for room-scale VR with laser-accurate tracking. I also really missed using the Knuckles controllers.

There is a lot more friction here than there is with the Quest 3. I miss passthrough. I miss how easy the Quest is to just throw on and use. But for my specific setup, I think the tradeoff may be worth it.

Conclusion

I briefly owned a Pimax 5K headset years ago and returned it because it was so annoying to operate. I am happy to say that this experience is much, much better. The Dream Air has a lot less friction, and things generally work much more smoothly.

If you are buying this headset, you are buying it for two reasons: the visuals and the form factor. I think it does a great job at both, but not out of the box.

The OLED panels, high resolution, low weight, wired DisplayPort connection, and lighthouse compatibility are exactly what I wanted. In the right game, the Dream Air can look stunning. But the stock comfort, audio, cable routing, vertical FOV, and lens sweet spot make it hard to call this a polished $2,000 product.

I cross-shopped it with the Bigscreen Beyond 2, but coming from a Quest 3, I wanted the best chance at edge-to-edge clarity possible, and that seemed like one of the biggest concerns with Bigscreen. The Crystal Super was on my radar too, but for my use case, I could not justify the larger form factor and tradeoffs just for the ability to swap optical engines.

VR never really took off as an industry in the way many of us hoped, so I do appreciate that Pimax is still trying to build high-end enthusiast hardware. For that reason, I am inclined to recommend the Dream Air- but only with a very large caveat.

This is not the right headset for the vast majority of people. If you are not already heavily invested in enthusiast-level VR hardware, I would have a hard time recommending it. If you mostly want ease of use, passthrough, wireless freedom, and excellent edge-to-edge clarity, the Quest 3 is still incredibly hard to beat.

But if you specifically want OLED blacks, very high resolution, a wired uncompressed image, a lightweight form factor, and you are willing to tinker a bit to make the comfort and cable situation work, then there is not much else out there that can really compete with the Dream Air.

If Pimax could improve the comfort, fix the audio situation, clean up the cable design, and somehow squeeze in a wider FOV with a bigger sweet spot, this thing would be worth its weight in gold. As it stands, it feels like an incredible set of panels in a headset that still needs a little help becoming the product it should have been out of the box.

Trying to identify these ants and figure out why they keep coming back.

I'm in the San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles area). Over the last year I've had several ant incursions in different parts of the house. We keep the house pretty clean. They've shown up near trash cans (indoors and out), and most recently I found them inside/around my clothes dryer, which was a new one. Any idea what they'd be looking for there? Moisture?

I've been using Advion gel. Every time I put it out they swarm it heavily, then disappear for a few weeks, only to show up somewhere else later. I also treated the exterior perimeter and interior baseboards with bifenthrin (Talak), but it doesn't seem to have solved the problem.

Based on the photos, do these look like Argentine ants, or something else? And if they are Argentine ants, is this normal behavior even after repeated baiting? Any advice?

Thanks