Play For Dream MR Review. *Potentially* the best 4k standalone VR Headset Yet

If you spend any amount of time in the VR space, you will quickly learn that there are no perfect VR headsets. Only bad ones, and those that fill a niche. I recently got my hands on a Play For Dream MR headset, which is a terrible name for a very cool product.

If you want a rapid summary, I believe that this headset is a few firmware updates away from being a true VR workhorse beast. This headset is for anyone who wants to get into "spatial computing" without touching the Apple Vision Pro and its associated Apple cooties. But, I caution about buying this headset if you only intend to play PCVR, due to the limitations of Qualcomm's video decoder, and especially if you intend to do standalone gaming. You may also want to hold off until the proper facial gaskets for western faces are released.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

I don't really make reviews of headsets, but given I am finding a lack of non-sponsored reviews of this device, I thought it would be for the best to give my perspective on the device after I spent 2000+ USD on the thing. I don't want to insult other creators who already made (sponsored) reviews many of them I found where insightful and honest. Still, as I am not a famous "influencer," I got the standard customer treatment after paying the standard customer price, so I hope y'all appreciate my perspective. While here I go over aspects that I believe are important for this this headset, please do feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions!

Note: The videos and screenshots taken by the headset are very high bitrate, thus making this webpage take a while to load. I decided instead of compressing them down, to leave them at their bitrate to give a better picture of what the headset feels like (though the headset itself does compress the videos too, so its still not 100% accurate). To keep this page load from being too painful, some videos will need to be clicked to load.

The Ordering Experience

The reason I am bringing this up is because this step was messier than it had to be.

First, in order to order the headset and accessories, you need to go to their second site https://pfdm.ai/, not their first site https://www.pfdm.cn/en/#/index . Only at their second site will you find a sane way to purchase the device (at least in the US).

And I have to say, they do a whole lot of talking about "AI features" of the headset, when in actuality the headset actually has no "AI features" what-so-ever (there is a small footnote in the bottom say that it's coming later). To be honest, I am getting tired of AI being awkwardly shoved into to all products. This headset has no need for built in "AI Image Generators" as advertised. If you are concerned about this device because the marketing makes it look like AI slop, I can promise you that this is not the case. I understand that "AI" is the current tech valley magic incantation used for investor funding, but personally, I would fire whatever marketing person made this page. Out of a cannon.

In addition to the headset, I also bought the prescription lenses, as I am basically blind without them. I added the lens item to my cart without another thought, then went through the standard Shopify purchase system to place the order. I got the confirmation email, and went on with my day.

Now, what I was expecting to happen was to receive an email to ask for my prescription details (this is how it works on other services), but by the next day this didn't happen. So I double checked the prescription lens store page, and discovered that there's a separate form to fill out your prescription info there, hidden under a button. I should note that at no point was I told about this, I had to find this myself. Regardless, I filled in the info.

The day after I got confirmation that my headset and lenses shipped. Within 4 days (seems like the headset came from a warehouse in California) I got an automatic email confirmation that my headset and lenses arrived together, and sure enough there was a big box on my doorstep! But, after digging through it, I found the headset itself and its accessories, but I couldn't find my lenses at all. I emailed support, and they stated that the system can erroneously tie items together, and assured me that the lenses were coming but separately. They gave me a new tracking number.

It took about 2 weeks, which is fair given the lenses were custom made, but also since they did ship from China. I received the lenses in a branded small lens carrying case along with a cloth. Finally I had everything i ordered!

So all in all, this wasn't a bad experience, but Play For Dream should really clarify how lens ordering works in particular. Regardless, I am happy that support was quick to respond.

As per their page, the headset box itself came the headset, a fabric front protective cover, a magnetic face gasket to attach to the headset itself, 2 magnetic facial cushions of different thicknesses, a angled USB charging cable for the headset + brick, 2 controllers and a USB C Y charging cable to charge them, and a cable clip for keeping the headset charging cable from swinging into your body. The prescription lens case had the play for dream logo on it, contained the magnetic lenses, and a cleaning cloth.

Device Setup

Device setup is so easy that you could do it blind.

No, seriously.

See, my impatient dumb ass didn't want to wait for the lenses to arrive when I had the headset in my hands. So I powered it on, placed it on my head, and could read absolutely nothing without my prescription. My glasses could not fit in the tight facial compartment either. The first menu that popped up was a language select, and I somehow fucked it up and selected Chinese. I couldn't find a back button (there may have been one but I couldn't see it). Even though I couldn't read anything, I realized that it first walked me through getting my IPD (the headset uses eye tracking and the motorized IPD sliders to do this on its own), WiFi setup, then pairing both controllers, which went seamlessly. No phone app, no crazy agreements, no hour long safety videos or forced login (ahem Meta). Honestly, excellent work here PFD team (I will abbreviate Play For Dream to PFD from now on).

I soon found a way to properly "see" into the headset a bit by removing all facial gaskets entirely so that my glasses could fit within the halo style headset strap. Of course then I couldn't really wear the headset, so I had to awkwardly hold the it with one hand and just spent some time poking around at various settings but didn't really do much. In the end didn't use the headset much till I got my lenses.

The lenses were a simple install. They had R and L lettering on them, and just magnetically snapped into the inner "lens" ring assembly, with no wiggle or play whatsoever.

I did decide to update the headset before using it proper. This was for the best since i did notice quite a few more options to play with and control stability seemed to be improved (notably before the update, I actually couldn't power off the device with the headset buttons, I had to go through the OS settings). I was glad to see an OS update actually improving the device instead of breaking things (cough - Quest Pro). I went through several rounds of updates as I was using the headset, each expanding functionality a bit, and at time of latest writing am on version D3_3.6.0.94. I should also note that at no point was an update forced on me. I turned off auto updates entirely.

Now, I will argue that the setup wizard does not really finish setting up the device. It turns out there's a lot of stuff to configure in the settings to make full use of this headset's abilities. I turned on 4K eye tracked foveated rendering (it defaults to 3k), low latency passthrough instead of high quality (I found the high quality passthrough mode actually looked a lot worse), and turned on chromatic aberration correction. I also had to configure my prescription lenses in the headset settings to enable proper corrections. I enabled eye tracking, hand tracking, which were off by default as well. A lot of visual fidelity and features that you spent your money on was off by default, which was certainly a bit puzzling.

But I did miss some things on my first pass through the settings. One thing that really bugged me was a lack of volume rocker, which I found super annoying in my initial impressions. I then discovered the "guide" app, which actually had quite a few useful hints as to where to change certain settings. It let me know that there was a way to change the rotating crown (a spinny knob on the top of the headset, which by default switches between VR and passthrough) to control volume instead. I wish more attention was brought to this guide for newcomers as I glossed over it for quite a while. But overall, I also appreciate giving the user the ability to seek more information, rather than shoving it all into their face on setup.

Device Build Quality and Comfort

Initially I was surprised when I heard that others did not think highly of the build quality on this headset. However, I am now beginning to understand why people think so, but the reasons are a bit more complicated.

This is not this companies first VR headset. This company has previously made the YVR headsets before they renamed themselves to, what is in my opinion, the much worse name "Play For Dream". Therefore, they do have some experience under their belt when it comes to design.

Headset

The headset itself is built pretty well in my opinion. It is mostly a rigid plastic, with the inside motorized lens assembly covered in a soft fabric to keep it sealed. Stiffer fabrics cover the facial casket and facial interfaces, which all can detach from each other magnetically. Feels good.

The back padding is connected to the headset assembly with 2 ball joins, which allow it to rotate up and down, and can be swapped off. The padding is alright and hasn't been an issue itself for me, though I do wish it was larger in area and reached lower. The knob itself felt okay, but sometimes the clicking of tightening / loosening the headset did leave me a touch concerned.

Which brings me to the concern of the unibody halo strap design. Very similar to a Quest pro, you cannot remove the straps. This means if the back knob fails, you wont be able to replace that part like you can with a Quest 3. It also limits user choice for better fit headstraps.

It is also angled, meaning the way the headset holds on your head was tilted in a way that took me some getting used to.

Further more the facial gasket doesn't conform well to my face. This is likely due to the headset prioritizing Asian faces first. Ir results in a lot of the weight resting on my eye brows, which gets uncomfortable after an hour. Good news PFD is working on a facial gasket more suited for European / Non-asian faces, something I am certainly willing to test.

But facial gasket aside, the knob in the back has be a bit worried. The way it clicks when it is released from a tight position has me concerned that the part could fail quickly, and without it you essentially cant use the device. But even if this wasn't an issue, not everyone may appreciate the Halo style strap general. I too prefer something with a top strap as well, and I hope accessory manufacturers find solutions for this, like they did with the Pico 4U.

Despite the halo design, it was shaped a bit better when it comes to laying down on a pillow. Laying on your back was "ok", but leaning on your side wasn't comfortable for me. It's much better than the Quest pro in this regard but this is still not a headset for sleeping.

Ultimately I think the headset design itself comfort wise is "fine," like most headsets, the only issue is it is so new and niche that other companies have really made accessories for this yet, but given how you can find interfaces fixing the weird comfort issues of the Pico 4U, I fully believe that it will be solved here on the headset.

Controllers

The controllers in style are pretty similar to the latest Quest and Pico controllers. It has 2 capacitive face buttons, a joystick with capacitive response and an RGB LED (to indicate charge and use status), a capacitive sensitive trigger and an inner button. It has configurable haptics. It does not open up to have replacement batteries, but rather has an awkwardly placed USB C port in the bottom. You can charge them with the included Y USB C charger cable.

My main concerns are in 2 things. First, these are made of a lighter plastic, that while yes lessens the weight of the whole thing, honestly feels really cheap. The other concern is a lack of a hand strap or even a wrist safety strap. Now I used to play with my Nintendo Wii a lot as a kid, and I learned pretty fast why we always wear wrist straps. There's not even a gap or anywhere to mount our own strap if we wanted, the only solution is for some sort of accessory case to wrap around the controller to add one.

Other Accessories

As for the other accessories, like the face gaskets, they were fine in material. They were comfortable, and I really love the magnetic design. However, face padding can get ruined over time, and I do hope that in general, PFD will sell replacements for these consumables, as well as third party companies make their own too.

Display Visuals and Pass-through

This is the highlight of this headset.

Displays

Not sure what I can say. Its 4K micro-oled. Of course they look great. I put on some videos to watch, and I certainly enjoyed the colors, crispness, and deep blacks of the OLED pixels. I didn't see any notable blurring of motion in VR content, and the peak brightness was way too high for my eyes (I ended up keeping it to the near minimum for the most part). I did want to mention that I was running in the 4K rendering mode, that I found myself limited to 80fps. This is fine for me, but it is something to consider. This could change in future updates.

The big thing for me on this headset was how usable for productivity it was. I was able to have 3 1440p monitors streamed via Virtual Desktop (more on this in a bit) and actually be able to read the text without eye strain. It was pretty awesome.

(While this was usable with the given face gasket, how I wish I had something better fitting to be able to see the much larger FOV this headset is capable of)

Passthrough

I did have to tune some settings for the pass-through from the default, and it turns out that the lower quality / low latency mode looks better for me in my environment (I feel that the HQ mode tries way to hard to over-correct some dark areas, to the point it creates a weird geometric noise). Once I had the settings tuned in, I was stunned at how tangible the passthrough was. I want to be clear I have tried many VR headsets and their pass-throughs, going from the Vive, the Index, the various Quest and Pico headsets. Notably I have not tried the Apple Vision Pro, but others have said that the PFD closes the gap with it. After seeing this, now I really want to demo an AVP to compare.

Don't get me wrong, you still see the grain of the camera, especially on darker environments, but I have not seen proper depth ever like this. Not only did you feel fully present in the environment in proper "3D", but there was also no warping. Like none, at all. Waving my hands around in front of the cameras, picking stuff up, looking at the edges, all things that cause the "jello" effect we all know from our Quests and Picos, completely nonexistent here. I ended up going to my kitchen to make myself some food, dragging a Firefox window with me. I was never able to feel safe working with knives and kitchen utensils while wearing any other VR passthrough headset.

Perhaps the main criticism I can give is the blurriness of rapidly turning your head around, but honestly it didn't bother me. You can also likely tune this as well, but frankly I was happy with the settings I had.

But seriously, to whatever team at PFD and Qualcomm worked on this, truly incredible work. This passthrough generational leap above the Quest 3 or Pico 4u.

Furthermore, in the most recent update, you can also change filters of the pass through (and even add your own), which is pretty fun.

(Yes my room is a mess, please ignore)

Optics

As for the optical stack and lenses? Well, I do want to preface again that the headset does not fit perfectly on my head due to the facial gasket, so take my words with a grain of salt. Testing with the given facial interface, I felt that the sweet spot was OK in size albeit not as good as the quest 3, and there was no warping. However, the field of view was quite small, I measured 80 degrees horizontal, and 60 vertical with their built in tool.

That being said, if I removed the facial interface that didnt fit well, and held the headset next to my eyeballs, I got much closer to true edge to edge clarity, and got a much bigger FOV (I measured 100 degrees horizontal, and 80 vertical, a massive improvement!). Truly, this headset is in need of a proper western face gasket. But even with stock, it is certainly way better than my daily driver Big Screen Beyond 1, if that's what you are worried about.

All in all the visuals of this device are excellent, but you may want to wait for properly shaped facial gaskets to get the full experience.

Tracking / Navigation

The headset supports various types of tracking, which are honestly a bit of a mixed bag but can hopefully be improved by updates.

6 DOF Headset Tracking

This worked flawlessly for me. I was able to walk around my house without any issue. When you are in passthrough mode, there are no boundaries of any sort. When you are in a VR application, the boundary system lets you select different sized circles. This is limiting, but only matters if you are using standalone VR software on this headset (though they seem to be expanding on this in future updates). But given I use passthrough or SteamVR for VR experiences (which has its own boundaries) frankly I don't care.

By default if you approach an object in your playspace that is blocking you (like in my case, a chair or my bed), it fades in gently into view. This is a simple but very effective method of alerting you that I liked, but I turned it off since I keep my VR playspace clear anyways.

The tracking by default is not too sensitive to a lack of light. You have to bring your room to near total darkness before it covers your view with a warning, and this occurs in VR or AR mode.

However, you can turn off the guardian system entirely. This even includes the check for lighting. I was, in AR mode, able to walk into a literal pitch black room without any warning whatsoever (interestingly 6DOF tracking kept working, but of course not hand tracking). I actually went, at 2 AM at the dead of night, up and down my house stairs in AR mode, only being able to see black static noise from the passthrough. Do I think this is a stupid thing to do? Yes. Am I happy that PFD lets you be this stupid? Yes. Good luck trying this on a Quest.

I do want to add the only time I noticed some wobblyiness with headset tracking was when I was completely outdoors in a field with no controllers. It seems to SLAM tracking of the headset cant deal with massive spaces, and it uses controllers to aid in staying stable. Bit odd, but also a very uncommon situation for most people to be in anyways.

Controller Tracking

Not great.

These controllers do get the job done for navigating UIs or playing basic games. Thanks to the headsets downward cameras on the headset, you actually can have the controllers on your lap when sitting or nearly at your sides when standing and still maintain tracking, unlike most other headsets. I found it workable in VRChat, especially with its capacitive buttons. They were comfortable to hold in my large guy hands.

Unfortunately, these controllers drift a lot with your head rotation. Not when you stand still, but when you rotate or move your head while keeping the controllers still, you do see them drift and rotate significantly. While I myself only use the controllers for navigating the UIs and wasn't really impacted, this really needs to be improved.

The other thing that bothered me was not only the absence of an index style wrist strap, but also a complete lack of safety strap. Perhaps I am in the minority, but I always use straps, since I don't want the controller to slip out of my hand and put a hole into a wall. And to be clear, not only was a wrist strip not included, there is no gap to insert one anyways.

Yes, perhaps the lack of straps make it easier to put up and down (and the controllers are very good at turning off when not in use, unlike my quest) but I really would like to see an accessory to add both of these straps. I like being able to release my hands in VRChat, and having think about always holding these controllers is weird to me.

But that being said, the purposes for which I will actually use this headset won't need the controllers much at all, so perhaps it doesn't matter. When I take this headset around, I bring a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, I don't want to also haul around controllers.

Then again Virtual Desktop STILL does not have an easy way to arrange panels with hand tracking alone, much less eye tracking, so maybe I would be stuck with the controllers anyways.

Hand Tracking

This feature is a bit rough but promising.

See, my intent for the headset is to use it for work, so I will grab this headset, and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I don't want to also bring controllers, which means I want to control my headset without them.

There main problem is click registration is frankly terrible. This headset has you pinch your index and thumb together to select, similar to other headsets. The trouble is a lot of the time the clicks don't seem to register, and sometimes when it does, it will spam like 4 clicks within a single frame. This is super annoying, and PFD absolutely needs to add some sort of filter to prevent this.

The other issue is a more common one, and its that hand tracking selection just doesn't feel too precise. Now the OS UI is big enough that is usually isnt an issue, but when working with Android apps it can be.

What is nice, however, is the headset has downward facing cameras, which means you can have your hands on your lap or near your sides and still get tracking. This is very comfortable compared to the Quest or Pico which need you to keep your hands essentially in front of the headset to work.

The other annoyance I had was a lack of a direct touch mode, where you can tap virtual screens directly with your fingers. This was great on the Meta headsets, especially on the virtual keyboards, and I hope they bring it here.

All in all could use some more work, but it seems the hardware is there, hopefully software updates can improve this. The promise is there and if they fix the clicking to be consistent, then I would be happy. I can tell from the passthrough cameras that they certainly should be seeing my hands just fine, so its all software from here.

The good news is while I was working on this review, another update hit which did improve this considerably, so I hope that they continue to improve this as time goes on.

Eye Tracking

This actually seems pretty promising, but is held back by hand tracking selection and lack of app support.

So this seems to be a bit impaired again by my improper fit face gasket, however after I adjusted it to what was seemingly the right position, the eye tracking worked very well. You do have to go through a quick calibration, but after that you are good to go. You can turn on an icon to show in the UI where you are looking, and it was generally correct. Much better than the launch of the vive focus vision at least.

Unfortunately, I was not able to test it in VRChat due to software not being updated yet to stream it, however again I do think the gaze direction detection is perfectly fine, but I do not know how it implements blink and "Social VR" expression tracking.

The eye tracking is good enough that you can actually navigate the OS with it. In a style basically stolen from the Apple Vision Pro, with this mode turned on, you can look at buttons to highlight them, then pinch your fingers to select them.

There are some issues with this. First, again with the hand tracking not identifying pinches or multi-clicking them. The other is while most elements of the OS are big enough to easily use eye tracking control on (sans some random things, like the X to close windows), Android apps that you installed on this headset aren't. Yes, you can use eye look to control these apps, but buttons are often too small to use properly.

In the above demo, you can see that the eye tracking does work (I enabled the cursor so you can see what it is doing). But again, Android Apps like FDroid here have smaller buttons which can be a tad bit tricky (or maybe its just a skill issue on my part).

You may also notice my eye gaze being limited to the lower portion of the view. Thats because with this face gasket when not adjusted just right, has the headset angled in such a way that the eye tracking can't see me look upwards. Holding the headset closer to my eyes without this gasket lets it work much better around the whole screen. Once again, we need a western facial gasket to fix this properly.

I should also note that you cannot use eye tracking to control Virtual Desktop at all, which again is my primary suggested use-case for this device. Bummer.

That being said, I thought this would totally be a gimmick. But with a proper gasket, this could actually be totally usable (Virtual Desktop depending).

Mouse and Keyboard

So this device supports Bluetooth keyboards and mice, and they connect without a hassle (including my combo Bluetooth keyboard touch-pad devices). With a Bluetooth keyboard connected, you can type in any keyboard field that pops up in the OS or any flat android app. The problem is the VR keyboard pops up too. Now, to be fair the overlay keyboard is functional, but it literally keeps getting in the way of seeing my physical keyboard (in pass through mode) every time I click something. This really should be fixed in the OS level.

As for the mouse? Well they connect, and you can use both the mouse and keyboard with Virtual Desktop without issue, but not only is there no way to configure things like mouse speed or anything in the OS, there actually is no cursor at all in the VR OS. I would really like for this to be an option, as it can be quite helpful in my opinion.

All in all I end up taking 1 controller with me to navigate the device when I work (Even though I mainly just use the keyboard and mouse). I do hope that eye / hand tracking improve enough, however, as well as mouse OS input, that I can stop taking my controllers with me if I want to work somewhere.

Overall OS Navigation

Ultimately, I was happy with the UI of the system and navigating it, although it can be improved. The home menu is essentially a grid of installed apps that scrolls horizontally...

And that's about it.

There is a quick launch menu you can enable, for things like audio, brightness, taking screen recordings and screenshots (I would love the ability for more buttons to be configured on there, for switching tracking types and so forth). Its handy but clearly still early.

Installed Android apps pop up in windows, that you can move around via the bottom bar. It exaggerates the forward and backward movement similar to a Pico, but without trying to attach it to some cylinder. Works well enough. I do wish it would be a bit more allowing of me putting apps near vertically up or down, but honestly this system still works better than the Quests or the Picos.

Whats also super cool is you can set a launch app. In my case, I set virtual desktop to launch directly at boot, so I can get right into controlling my machines. Its hidden in the developer options, but I hope they bring this out to a general settings section.

There were some other fun tidbits. This headset can stream the POV right to any typical media streaming device, such as a Roku or Android TV. No weird proprietary app required (ahem again Meta). It also had built in screenshotting and screen recording functionalities.

Honestly, I don't mind this UI being bare-bones. I don't want a jam packed 500 feature OS jam packing my UI and slowing my device down. If I wanted that, i would be using my Quest Pro. I like how empty and simple the UI is, and I hope that PFD does not pollute it with the AI crap they talked about.

If I have one main criticism, and I do, its that there is no "back" button for android app windows. This is annoying and has "soft locked" me in several installed apps many times. Hopefully this is a quick addition.

But, if I were to have a longer wish list, I would ask if they could just steal the window placement / resizing UI from the Hololens 2 (which in my opinion had one of the best XR interfaces of all time, fight me). Let us grab windows to reposition them, drag with our hands the edges and corners to resize them, and let us set the windows to follow us instead of us having to take them with us manually like some future caveman.

But all in all, the UI does not get in my way, which is the main thing I can ask for any UI.

Audio

Not much to say here. The over ear style speakers we see on many headsets is done here quite well, with volumes being able to reach painfully loud but still clear.

The built in microphone is fine, it's no big screen beyond but the folks I was talking to in VRChat seemed plenty happy with its performance. It avoided any popping sounds or picking up the sounds of me breathing.

The settings do allow using external audio, both for speakers and microphones, but due to a lack of any 3.5mm jack, I assume this would have to be done over the USB cable.

However, I had no USB DAC with pass through charging, which unfortunately, is a practical requirement.

Speaking of which....

Battery Life (or lack thereof)

55 minutes. That is how long it took to go from 100% to getting the 10% battery warning. This headset has the battery life of about an hour.

Yeah there is no sugar coating it, the 5000 mAh battery just ain't enough for this hardware. To be fair, I was running the headset in 4K eye-tracked foveated rendering mode, with eye and hand tracking enabled, while also running passthrough. This is the worst case scenario and doing literally anything else will get you a better result. Still though, I paid for the whole headset, I will use the whole god-damn headset.

Now, in the first revision of the review, I treated this as a major failing of this headset. However, thinking about it more, the main headset competitor to the PFD is the Apple Vision Pro. And they don't store the battery in the headset at all, they have a separate wired battery that is connected via cable. So if they can do that, why can't I?

Well, you can. I connecting up an Anker QC3 battery up to this headset using the PFD's included right angle USB C cable, and was good to play VRChat for several hours. And hell, if I wanted to, I could unplug this external battery when it died, and plug in another. The rate of charging way outpaced its usage. I am not sure if you would really call this "wireless" but it is a way to make the headset usable.

However, some people prefer the more convenient setups of having everything on your head. BOBOVR has their battery straps for the Quest 3 with magnetic swappable batteries. I actually did take a Quest 3 BOBOVR S3 Pro battery strap, and connected it (awkwardly) to this headset to test out the charging ability. Turns out while it was slow, I did find the battery was able to charge up the PFD while in use. I really hope that PFD works with BOBOVR to create a battery backplate for this device (like with the Pico) because it seems like a good way to fix the before-mentioned comfort issues, and a way to make the battery life usable without having any cable dangle by your side.

But yes, you are absolutely going to need some other way of providing power to this device. I doubt they can improve this significantly with updates, so accept this fact.

VR Gaming

Now before we talk about VR gaming, let me detail my setup.

Yes, my GPU is way below spec that you want for full on 4K rendering. But please understand that the "minimum spec" GPU you need for the "Monstrous" 4k encode mode is the Nvidia RTX 5090.

You see the problem right? Rendering 4K per eye VR is hell enough to a PC, but having to then encode it and stream it out also takes a lot of cycles, hence these ridiculous requirements. And the thing is, with streaming, you will ALWAYS have worse latency and more compression artifacts vs if you have a displayport in the headset directly. You are overspending on getting much higher specs for a PC to deal with this overhead, and getting a worse result anyways. Perhaps you may not care because you are financially willing and / or really care for the "wireless" aspect (ignoring the fact you would want Wifi 6E / Wifi 7 for this, which already limits you to a small rather direct range to begin with). Perhaps you are willing to spend the thousands of USD to make this technically work out?

I decided to test this on my. I set the "Ultra" encoding settings, launched SteamVR with a resolution set to 4K per eye (I do not believe VD streams actual 4K on Ultra though), and jumped into VRChat. I was expecting artifacting and latency to be ruining the image feed but actually? It looked really good. I can't lie. Below are screenshots taken from the headset itself to see its perspective.

Now, while these look great, many of you may be noticing something. My latency, at some points, exceeds 100 ms. This is pretty awful and completely noticeable even in "chill" games like VRChat. Now, those worse case scenarios were largely caused by my 3080 dying from the load, however look at the ones where my PC and WiFi times are low. Actually, a majority of the time, its the decode that's taking the most time. That is the Qualcomm chip trying to handle the decoding of a 4K stream, and clearly, it simply can't fast enough.

While I believe many other issues of this headset can be addressed with software updates, I am hesitant to believe this is one of them. This is a hardware limitation of the SOC. I believe many people who play social VR games with overpowered computers won't mind as much, but honestly if you don't fall in this group and want low latency PCVR for action games / beat saber / sim games, I will be blunt and say this headset is probably a no go for you.

Actually, I must be more blunt. Other standalone 4K headsets are coming, but almost everyone is using Qualcomms SOCs. ANYONE using them will most likely have this problem, so its not Play For Dream specific. This also means using an Ethernet adapter for "wired" streaming play won't help much.

True shame, cause the visuals are nice.

As an experiment, I did a demo with full on monstrous encode settings, despite my PC not meeting the minimum specs at all. Why? Because I wanted to fry the GPU real hard to see what would happen.

Yup, I even joined in on some random full black-cat with all avis turned on. My 3080 will murder me in my sleep one of these days.

All in all, it still remained stable, but you can see my FPS was suffering, as well as latency again. Make no joke about it, you really need a top end 5090 if you want to use this properly, although you will be still fated to have some latency thanks to Qualcomm.

Installing Apps

Installing APKs on this was great, very happy how they let or even encourage you to do what you want with your device.

The first thing I installed on this device was FDroid, which I grabbed via the built in chromium browser. I was able to find the APK in the files app (which even had a dedicated APK section) and install it straight from there. And just like standard Android, after giving the right permissions FDroid was able to install apps without issue.

I picked up the Fennec browser (FireFox based) and installed that. It worked right out of the box, and was even able to set it as my default browser (which the OS seemed to respect).

I installed Youtube Revanced. This worked with the Huwei version of GApps (not sure why, the Quest headsets need this version too to work) but once that was installed, I was easily able to use the tablet UI (or phone UI, there is a switcher per app in this OS), and set videos to full screen mode, and pin it wherever. I also installed Jellyfin, which worked flawlessly on 4k HEVC footage. This is really a nice headset for media consumption (or for pinning TV episodes to the background while you are cooking).

I installed Discord, and while the main functionalities and voice chat worked, I could not start a video stream either of my cameras (Discord would state none were detected) or of the headset POV as a screenshare (Discord would just crash). Hopefully, PFD can find a way to address this.

I tried installing Nextcloud, but unfortunately had login issues. I have had issues on other devices though, so this could be a Nextcloud client issue, not this headset.

In the end, the headset did not get in my way, that's all I asked for, and it delivered. I just hope they address camera functionality.

Final Thoughts

I may have been hard on this headset in many ways, but that's because I actually like it and see potential in it.

But "seeing potential" is not "buy this right now". This headset is expensive, and frankly I understand if many elect to wait for the software to be cleaned up first, and for accessories to make things more comfortable with them. I am hopeful these things will be improved, but I can't review a hope, only what is on my face.

I should also mention that unlike some other company products (Ahem, Pimax and Meta), this headset was quite stable. I got 0 crashes in my entire use time with it, which is excellent. I do have to mention I did see some stuttering whenever the headset loads something new (most prominently in VD when I add or remove a monitor, though once loaded its 100% fine). However, I believe this can be rectified in software.

So, who should consider this headset?

• First off, everyone in the west should probably wait for some better fitting face gaskets to come out first.
• If you are looking for a work "spatial computer" headset, I would genuinely consider this, especially if you like using Virtual Desktop already. If you are the type of person who was looking into the Immersed Headset, look into this headset instead as Immersed has become a laughing stock, even by VR hardware company standards. The 4K panels have made this headset fully usable for projecting 3 1440p virtual monitors, and is completely unbeatable by any other mainline standalone offering (with the exception of the AVP itself) for this use-case.
• If you want to play stand alone games on a VR headset, do not buy this. There are basically no unique exclusive titles on this headset. Even Pico has more, but what you probably want is a Quest.
• If you play competitive "fast reflex" PC VR games, consider something else. Aside from the fact that those games may not even benefit much from the additional resolution, the decoding latency of the Qualcomm chip easily will put you in a disadvantage. Furthermore, if you intend to use the included controllers, you will not be happy by their tracking inaccuracies.
• I would be wary if you are playing PCVR games that are slower (social VR). Sure, some games would appreciate the higher resolution, but you still aren't getting the full capability of panels thanks to compression, you are still dealing with additional latency, and you will get worse performance due the encoding requirements. Besides, slower games like VRC often used compressed textures in their maps due to file-size constraints, so you may not be getting much out of those 4K panels anyways.
• If you play Sim games (flight simulators, racing simulators), honestly you are sitting for the most part, and you may want to look for a wired 4K headset instead of dealing with alkl the compromises of WiFi Streaming instead.
• I also caution that I have not tested the eye tracking for social VR applications yet, I do not know if it features the full set of expressions that these users would want.
• This headset may make more sense if you need a work first, but also play headset, this headset CAN be used for gaming, but I just don't think that is its primary focus

Closing Remarks

On 2022, Meta released the Quest Pro, a headset intended for workspaces. They failed. Catastrophically. in 2024, Immersed promised a headset intended for workspaces. They failed. Hilariously. Who knows if that will actually release.

The Play For Dream is the first headset I witnessed that actually can be used for workspaces. Thankfully, for this purpose, the issues I seen are largely repairable with software updates, a proper gasket or potentially some other accessories. The headset itself is not inherently flawed for this purpose.

However, seeing the limitations of WiFi streaming pains me so much, as this would have been such a obvious buy for pro VR Gamers if there just was a way to pipe in displayport directly. But there isn't, and so the recommendation for that crowd will always carry an asterisk at best.

But in a world full of bad headsets, Play For Dream beat the odds and made one that fills a niche, and that alone is still an accomplishment to be proud of.

But for any potential buyers, you still may want to wait for a few more rounds of patches and some comfort accessories to come out first.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions!

Other than that, I hope to be doing other cool blog topics in the future!