Pimax just pulled back the curtain on the Crystal Pro, its latest wireless PC VR headset, at the “Frontier: Change To Stay The Same” event. The big headline here is something called Native Foveated Streaming, which sounds fancy because, well, it is. Alongside the headset, Pimax also showed off its new Ringless VR Controllers, a pint-sized Spation mini-PC. Say hello to Stratosphere Blue.
Crystal Pro comes ready to stream over Wi-Fi right out of the box, thanks to a built-in Wi-Fi 6E adapter. If you want to go full native with your GPU’s image, there’s an optional 60G AirLink kit. You can buy it bundled or separately. Here’s where it gets clever: with eye-tracking, the 60GHz connection beams your GPU’s image straight to wherever you’re looking. Thus, it skips the usual Wi-Fi encoding shuffle.
The kit uses two Room Antennas in a 2×2 MIMO setup, which Pimax claims is a first for VR headsets, and promises up to 6 Gbps speeds with less than 2ms of extra lag. That’s fast enough to make your ping jealous.
VR Headset Display features
Under the hood, you’re getting aspheric glass lenses and QLED panels that push 2880 x 2880 pixels per eye. You also get a 110-degree field of view and refresh rates up to 120Hz. For tracking, it’s a bit of a greatest hits album: eye-tracking, inside-out SLAM 2.0, and a faceplate you can swap out for Lighthouse support or mixed reality passthrough with LiDAR. The headset has no internal battery. Power comes from a chunky 16,000mAh external pack, so you’ll want to keep it handy.
The new Ringless VR Controllers ditch the old tracking ring for camera-based hand tracking, plus infrared and motion sensors, all with under 15ms of latency. They also snap into a gamepad for Windows and Steam, so you can switch from waving your hands to button-mashing in seconds.
Spation is Pimax’s new mini-PC, packing desktop-level muscle into a case smaller than your average tower. You can kit it out with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU and either an AMD RX 9070 XT or Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti GPU. It runs Windows or SteamOS, and if you like to tinker, there’s a DIY option too.
You can get the Crystal Pro AirLink kit in the box or just the kit. Shipping dates and prices for the Ringless VR Controllers and Spation are still under wraps. If you’re feeling impulsive, you can lock in a preorder for just $1 at pimax.com.
Pimax has built its name on high-res, wide field-of-view PC VR headsets like the Crystal and Dream Air series. If you want to dive deeper, check out www.pimax.com.
For more gaming tech news and updates, stay tuned to TGXP³.