Play for Dream MR Android headset for PCVR

[chiliwili69]

 

Thinking for IL-2 candidate:

 

Good points:

3840x3552 per eye

Micro-OLED

Pancake lenses

Eye-tracking

3 hour batery in the back (not in the front)

Wifi 7

 

Big bad points:

FOV like Quest2

200Mbps limit decoding bandwidth of XR2+ Gen2 (Apparently no DP Alt-Mode over USB-C)

 

It looks it will be available for US in "March" for about 2000$, no idea about EU:

https://www.pfdm.cn/en/#/mr

[Aapje]

Looks like it has the same panel as the MeganeX superlight 8K. It's pretty nice that BOE doesn't have an exclusive agreement with one company, so lots of companies can now make something using those panels.

[chiliwili69]

20 hours ago, Aapje said:

It's pretty nice that BOE doesn't have an exclusive agreement with one company, so lots of companies can now make something using those panels

 

Yes, but the current problem is the size of MicroOLED panels, they are so small now, so we can forget about having god FOVs for now.

[chiliwili69]

One of the people of thr RealoVirtual forum has tested the Playfor Dream:

 

 

Translated from Google:

 

Last Thursday I received the headset from their Kickstarter campaign, and since then I've been using it quite a bit, trying out things and tinkering with it as much as I can. These are my first impressions with it

I'd like to clarify that I neither have nor have been able to try the Apple Vision Pro, so I can only compare it with the headsets I currently have (Quest 3, Pico 4 and Pimax Crystal).

 

Package: The headset arrived very well packaged and the product box itself conveys a fairly premium feel (although as expected given the RRP), it is of good quality and protects the headset very well.

 

Comfort: The headset is not the lightest (650g) but the weight is very balanced (Pico 4 style), which makes it not feel heavy when using it. On the negative side, the headset does not support any vertical rotation adjustment and the faceplate is very rigid, so adjusting it properly can be a bit complicated and not everyone fits it correctly (some people have already modified it).

 

Displays: The best part of the headset, the resolution is incredible, the colors pop and the contrast is impressive thanks to the uOLED. I've watched a few 8K180º videos and some 4K in their cinema app, and the experience has been one of the best I've had with a VR headset.

Lenses: Unfortunately not as good as the screens, they have glare and some CA and loss of clarity at the edges, the lenses of the Q3 or Pimax are better (although the PfD look sharper thanks to the extra resolution).

 

Standalone Games: Right now they have very few in their store, I've tried a couple of them and what has stood out the most has been the rendering resolution, which I would say that most of them work at the native resolution of the screens (I imagine thanks to the DFR, which is active at the OS level). I've also tried some sidequest games (which the headset is compatible with), but very few have worked and others did so with tracking errors.

 

PCVR: Right now it's only available through its Streaming App... and it's noticeably in need of a lot of polishing. It's functional and the image quality isn't bad (although it lacks the clarity that you get in the UI or in some native games), but in several games I've had artifacts and some tracking errors, while in others the experience has been good (like in Alien Rouge Incursion). I'd say the image clarity is better than the Q3 (using VD in Godlike) but worse than the Crystal, although the blacks and colors of the uOLED make for a good experience, but with a lot of room for improvement.

EDIT: After playing with the streaming app settings, I've been able to greatly improve PCVR's image quality and reduce artifacts. The clarity isn't yet at the level of the Crystal but it's not far off, and since it's rendering at a much lower resolution, there's a boost of almost 20% in fps compared to them.

 

Passthrough: The resolution is better than the Q3 and has no distortions, but it looks a bit grainier. I imagine they can improve it with updates, as the quality of the cameras is much better.

 

Camera: The truth is that it has surprised me in a good way, both when viewing photos and videos in "Spatial" mode and in 180º mode, one of the best in its price range (less than 2K). The videos are recorded in 8K@45fps although they are not full 180º, which has the edges cut off.

Android Apps: After installing the Aurora Store I have been able to download almost any Android app (it also supports APKs), and although most have worked, right now the Windvine DRM does not work correctly, which means that most video streaming apps do not work (not even with the browser). They are also working on being able to change the aspect ratio of their windows, which currently can only be adjusted in size and changed between vertical or landscape.

 

Eye Tracking: It works perfectly (as expected for Tobii XD) and they use it to do native DFR in the OS. Let's hope they manage to implement this in their PCVR app.

Hand Tracking: It works although not as well as in Q3, but they have already announced that it is in beta phase and that it will receive updates actively.

UI/OS: Right now it looks like a VisionOS clone, and you can even use the Eye Tracking + Hand Tracking combination to manage it (which works surprisingly well). I have had some tracking losses and some apps have sometimes closed unexpectedly, but in general it works pretty well.

 

Battery: It runs out very quickly, depending on what you are doing between 1-1:30h, although it also charges quickly. These numbers improve a lot using a Power Bank (with a normal one I got about 3 hours of estimated use in PCVR).

 

Conclusion: I'm pretty happy with it so far, especially for multimedia consumption and using it as a 3D camera (if you're not afraid of people looking at you weird, of course XD). PCVR needs work to take full advantage of its features and the DRM problem needs to be solved as soon as possible, but considering the stage it is at, these are things that should be corrected with updates.

 

Pictures:
ibb.co/mVD7Hft6
ibb.co/Y71qz6Zk
ibb.co/qF7bwqTm
ibb.co/WNyNDD8B

 

A more details:

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't have a native DP connection, and right now they have their own app to stream PCVR. The FoV in PCVR is limited to 94º (that's what the Risa marks when using its Streaming app), but in theory it goes up to 103º, so I suppose they will improve it with some update of the app (which is quite green right now).

The lenses are worse than those of the Quest 3, since the Play for Dream's lenses towards the edge do show blur and also have glare (but not as much as the Pico 4). Although seeing that right now they already use Eye Tracking to correct chromatic aberration, I'm curious if they can do something similar with blur, like the Almalence digital lens did.

 

For now it only has 90Hz and 72Hz.

 

The SteamVR resolution is set by its Streaming app and can be configured to almost whatever you want (the stock one was for its previous viewer and was very low). I have currently modified it and have the native resolution of the viewer (3840x3552 per eye) and the HEVC@200Mb codec, and with that configuration I have a sharper image than with the Q3 (VD Godlike in AV1@200) but somewhat less than with the Crystal at 100% (4312x5100). Although the blacks and colors are much better than with any of them.

 

I also did some tests increasing the resolution even more in their app, and although I did notice an improvement in the clarity of the image, there were many artifacts so they were not usable. The question I have is if this is something caused by their streaming app and can be improved with updates, or is it simply that we are already at the limit of the PC GPU encoder or the SoC decoder of the viewer (which should be the same as the Q3).

 

Source:  https://www.realovirtual.com/foro/topic/65644/play-dream-mr-primeras-impresiones

[chiliwili69]

This are the FOVs reported by the Risa2000 app (https://risa2000.github.io/hmdgdb/) which is based on the geometry of the headset:

 

horizontal: 94.46 deg
vertical: 90.00 deg
diagonal: 111.64 deg
overlap: 94.46 deg

[102nd-YU-cmirko]

https://pfdm.ai/

 

it will be cool to hear first reports from Il2 and DCS players.

 

 

Edited April 5 by 102nd-YU-cmirko

[chiliwili69]

More on this one:

 

 

[102nd-YU-cmirko]

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7036162

a few more degrees ^^

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

For that big native resolution plus overhead for distortion correction, I believe using  Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ gen2 with Synchronous Space Warp (SSW) and  Snapdragon Game Super Resolution 2  inside the headset will be mandatory to have  fluid motion at 90hz. My experience show that SSW done inside headset is better than meta ASW done in PC. 

[chiliwili69]

This headset at 90Hz is rendering less pixels than the actual pixels of the panel, just a 72% of the physical panel:

 

This is something very similar to what the Quest3 is doing, the rendered/panel ratio is different dependeing on the refresh frequency, for 72Hz the ratio is 103% and for 90Hz it is 83%:

 

 

I don´t know if the Play for Dream is doing the same for 72Hz.

 

The reason behind that for Quest3 is not yet totally clear to me.

One reason could be to get similar performance in the PC side, requiring similar PC GPU load to render/encode (1.03*72 is similar to 0.91*80 and 0.83*90).

Another reason could be the bandwidth and performance of the XR2 doing the decoding work, but the limit of encoded flow of data is always the same (200Mbps for H265 for Quest3), so indepedendently of how the image has been rendered, for a given bitrate (200Mbps) you will get better images at 72Hz than at 90Hz since that encoded info is distributed in less frames.

 

In any case, I would love to have the Play for Dream in my hands to really check the visual quality at different rendered resolutions since the clear bottleneck it is in the bitrate processing of the XR2+ Gen2 chip (both use GPU Adreno 740, at slightly (15%) different frequencies)

[JohnSmith886]

It appears as though virtual desktop for PFD does currently not support foveated rendering based on eye tracking and the highest render resolution you can choose in VD is only 3200x3000 per eye (God-Like), which is the same as the maximum you can choose in VD on the Quest 3. This is probably due to the XR2+ gen 2 chip not being able to decode more than 200 MBit/s AV1 fast enough. But perhaps other codecs can be used? Or at least eye-tracking supported so that the view area the eyes look at can be rendered at a higher resolution? Otherwise those great panels are wasted in pc vr. Does alvr support a higher render and streaming resolution with eye-tracking?

[JohnSmith886]

On 5/29/2025 at 9:19 AM, chiliwili69 said:

This is something very similar to what the Quest3 is doing, the rendered/panel ratio is different dependeing on the refresh frequency. 

Are you sure the Quest 3 is doing that? At least when using virtual desktop, the steam render resolution appears to stay the same when God-Like is selected at 72 and 90 Hz target frame rate (roughly 3200 x 3000 per eye). I would assume that the streaming resolution also stays 1:1 the same (even though it has to cram more frames per s into the 200 MHz/s bandwidth). Are you sure the streaming resolution is lowered at 90 compared to 72 Hz?

[chiliwili69]

On 6/4/2025 at 2:22 PM, JohnSmith886 said:

Are you sure the Quest 3 is doing that?

 

Yes, I am.

If you have a Quest3 (or also in Quest2 and 3S) you only need to change the refresh rate and you will see that the rendering resolution for 1.0x change automatically.

In this image going to 120Hz it lower even more the rendering.

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

This is why XR2 is not powerful enough to  decode at 120 Hz at higher resolution , maybe more for self preservation to not exceed thermals or hog soc.

XR2+ on Pico ultra allow to decode at 600Mbps x264+ on VD.

Edited June 5 by 1PL-Husar-1Esk