Pimax Crystal Super – A VR Sceptic’s Impressions

Why the Scepticism?

To better understand my points, it is worth clarifying my perspective. I tried VR for the first time 20 years ago, more or less, at a fair. It was either a prototype, dev kit, or the first Oculus, years before the acquisition by Facebook/Meta. It was a cool idea, but the technology was not there yet, of course.
Fast-forward to almost a decade ago, at that point, I started building my own Arduino-based control panels. They are cheap and simple: all it takes is a soldering iron and a hand drill. Still, they allowed me to add both efficiency and immersion to my flight sim experience.
Leaping forward a bit more, we arrive at the post-Covid era. About three years ago, I heard about the mixed reality and other features of the Meta Quest 3, and I decided to give it a go. I set it up and tuned it, and used it a dozen times, then abandoned it. The technology was not ready yet, in my opinion.

Immersion: not only Visuals

The vast majority of the VR supporters push the visual aspect as the most important characteristic provided by such a technology. The better sense of perspective, for example, allows players to conduct AAR, saddle in formation, and more, in a much more intuitive manner and with greater precision. Personally, the greatest advantage I have found is that a close-to-padlocked situation is manageable in VR, whereas with the Track IR it is not as simple. The primary reason is that the movement is proportional. The Track IR is, depending on how the curves are set, either exponential or otherwise non-linear.
The other side of the visual feedback is the definition, which may or may not relate to the hardware requirements. Being a dedicated backseater, I found basic operations such as finding patterns in the displayed radar returns, or assessing drift, unnecessarily frustrating for a series of reasons I will discuss in greater detail later.
Back to the topic, the “immersivity gradient” of a video game is not only related to the visual aspect. For example, I put together a simple DIY haptic system with less than 100£. I used a simple USB sound card and two 50W bass shakers. It might be cheap, but feeling your aeroplane vibrating as it gets closer and closer to a stall, or when the reheat kicks in, is really something you should try.

Then, there is the “tactile” side. Many players use a HOTAS, a gamepad, or other similar devices. My panels are extremely cheap, cheaper than any mid-range HOTAS, but allow me to control thousands of functions. Hearing the “click” of a latched switch, or a knob, the feedback of push buttons and rotary encoders, is very satisfying. When the pace of the action goes up, as a “threat” is called but the AWG-9 or APQ-120 are blank, the muscle memory kicks in, both hands move to the panels, and the fun skyrockets.

Is Technology There Yet?

On top of the immersion point of view, VR has another series of drawbacks: the hardware requirements I have mentioned already, or the simple fact that it tends to isolate the user, something far from ideal if you have to monitor menaces such as young kids. Little things add up, and the total sum prevented me from becoming a fan of VR.
Things, however, have changed. On the technological side, and let’s not open Pandora’s Jar that the AI bubble is, the advent and improvement of technologies such as DLSS can help to offset the hardware requirements, at least marginally.
Still, the other issues remained: the quality of the headset itself and its features. This is where the arrival of the Pimax Crystal Super shifted my experience in quite a considerable way.

Note: frames captured from the recorded footage. In-game quality and detail was much higher.

Quest 3 to Pimax Crystal Super

The experience with the Pimax Crystal Super has been brilliant. The device is de facto plug and play, whereas the Quest 3 took me through the setup of the app, odd driver and firmware issues, and more. I know the Meta mobile application was probably unnecessary, but I followed the prompted instructions – silly me, never trust Zuck.
Anyway, to configure the Quest 3 as I wanted, I had to download additional tools and software, such as the Oculus Tray Tool, libraries, and more. Once again, they were not strictly necessary, but it another layer to add on top of the above to achieve something that should be instead available out of the box.
See, the simplest example I can think about to describe the experience is represented by the controllers. The Meta controllers use a couple of batteries. Pimax’s are charged via the USB port. It is a minor detail, but it caused me a few issues when I wanted to try again the Quest 3 after months without using it. Namely, a firmware update was released, there was some prompt to select or something, but the controllers’ batteries were out. I did not have any spare batteries with me, and I was stuck. In Pimax’s case, all I have to do is plugging in the controllers. Again, it is a minor detail, but I hope it conveyed the sense that the Quest 3 often had something external it required, or heavily benefitted from, to function properly.
The switch to Pimax was straightforward, with the only issue being the OpenXR Runtime misconfigured, probably due to the presence of the Facebook drivers and device. Once I set it back to Pimax OpenXR, all went smoothly.

Crystal Super: Impressions

The headset is on the heavier side, but I did not find it to be a problem even after prolonged sessions. The cable needed a bit of management instead, as it is quite stiff compared to the one I bought for the Quest 3, but once I properly attached it to my chair, this minor nuisance disappeared entirely.
The first thing that hit me was the quality of the lenses. The headset arrived with the 50PPD QLED engine installed. The peculiarity of such an engine is the increased field of view, horizontally reaching 120° versus the 106° of the 57PPD engine. The effect is excellent. I guess it can be compared to my 3440×1440 21:9 Ultrawide screen versus a standard 16:9. Personally, I think the increased FoV is not strictly necessary if you play mostly flight simulators, as cockpits tend to develop vertically and horizontally, versus something akin to a First-Person Shooter, for example, where the vertical element tends to be secondary. Still, it makes checking 6′ simpler and quicker and, more importantly, it tends to reduce the “tunnel” effect that narrower lenses may have.
After a few months of testing the headset, I encountered no major problems, and software and firmware updates have been smooth. In terms of distortion, artefacts, and lack of definition in certain areas of the field of view, nothing is particularly evident. A marginal degree of loss of quality is visible at the very edge compared to the super sharp and clear centre. In particular, a certain level of chromatic aberration is appreciable, especially if the headset is not worn correctly, or settings are off. Still, this effect does not impact the readability of the avionics, which is an important detail when flying.
The Pimax Crystal Super supports technologies such as QuadView and Foveated Rendering. In simple terms, the movement of your eyes is tracked by the headset, and only the portion of the scene you are focusing on is fully rendered. The advantage performance-wise, depends on the system specifications but, given the era we are living in, it is a welcomed benefit.
Speaking of performance, such a topic was tackled in-depth in a dedicated article.

Note: frames captured from the recorded footage. In-game quality and detail was much higher.

Pimax Crystal Super in DCS

As I mentioned earlier, and if you have watched the video linked above, I play as a dedicated backseater on the DCS F-14 Tomcat and the F-4E Phantom II. One of the issues I raised initially when I mentioned the experience of older headsets was the lack of clarity, ghosting, and other issues that I always found particularly annoying.
Taking the APQ-120 as an example, this 70-year-old Pulse radar was innovative and powerful for the era, but it required some babysitting. In-game, several of its drawbacks are represented. In numerous instances, in order to find a target, a keen eye and good pattern recognition skill are helpful. To put it bluntly, if the pixels on the DSCG are not changing, chances are that a target is being illuminated. Or the ground is, but that’s another can of worms. So, as you can imagine, the lack of clarity and definition is an issue for a human WSO. Other players might not agree, but added to what I said so far, it curbed my enthusiasm for the VR technology. Let’s put it this way: why use a 3D device to inefficiently monitor a 2D display, whilst losing access to my full setup, TFT screens, and other tools I made to improve my enjoyment? However, I am pleased to say that the Pimax Crystal Super provided a surprisingly good and effective experience.

Back to DCS, if you play as a chauffeur, AKA front gunner, AKA stick monkey, especially onboard self-piloting aka modern aircraft, then the issue I had with previous headsets might not be as relevant to you. Jokes aside, modern digital avionics are not as affected by reduced visual fidelity. A HUD or an MFD, in fact, already present data digested and pre-packed by the onboard sensors, with little to no raw information. As long as they are clearly readable, the drawbacks are marginal.
Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the enhanced sense of depth and other advantages come in handy when playing as a pilot. In this context, the Pimax Crystal Super’s clear and wide field of view makes the job even simpler, as instruments or display can be scanned at a glance with little to no distortion.

What I would love to have

The Pimax Crystal Super, at this stage, does not natively support mixed reality. This is something I would love to see, but it is also a very niche application. For convenience and quick checks on your devices, the Crystal Super comes with cameras that allow you to “look outside”, so to speak, without raising the headset. This mode is called “pass-through”. The resolution and overall functionality are extremely limited, to the extent that I could not read my panels at all, so the purpose of this function is mostly orientational.
In fact, you might have noticed in the section of the displayed video about the Phantom II, how sometimes I had to find the controls I needed by touching around. Luckily, I did not have to use the air-to-ground dedicated panel, that would have been impossible in VR.

Curiosity: Negative Track-IR “Side Effects”

I mentioned earlier how the edges of the display can be distorted, and particularly affected by chromatic aberration. Moreover, if enabled, QuadViews and Eye Tracking downgrade the quality of the visual representation of the areas not focused by your eyes. I noticed these effects immediately. Why? Because of the habits I picked up whilst using the Track IR for 25 years.
This device, in fact, induces you to hold your head still and scan with your eyes. Not only that, you quickly learn to use your peripheral vision much more than you otherwise would. For example, let’s consider the Detail Data Display and the Elevation Strobe of the Tomcat: whilst focused on the DDD, I can keep track of the Elevation Strobe as well. Not clearly, of course, but I am aware of the scanned bar. This enables quick correlation of a return and its altitude even in Pulse Search and Pulse Doppler Search modes, thanks to a couple of mnemonic equations. In VR, the position of the head is different, so this example is less applicable, but alternatives include gauges and other displays.

Conclusions

To wrap this up, I am quite satisfied with the experience provided by the Pimax Crystal Super. The clarity and field of view are great, solving one of my critiques of older VR technology. Personally, I would love to see native mixed reality supported, which would be fantastic for people who build their own panels without staling on a single module. However, I understand this is indeed a niche application that affects a minor fraction of the user base.
The performance topic I discussed in a dedicated video is still a bit of a question mark: as I showed, even the native, superb resolution is usually very good even on older systems such as mine, as long as missions stay reasonably complex. The background video you may have watched used no DLSS, QuadView, or other means to increase the FPS, and the experience in-game was even better than what the footage shows.
Another bonus is that the setup of the Crystal Super was flawless and straightforward, a long way from Meta’s flow, if you follow their process, that is. Plug the cables, set up Pimax Play, and you are good to go.
Dulcis in fundo, if I were to move to VR these days, I would seriously consider Pimax’s headsets. For what I do, and in the detail I do, their range is quite exceptional, sine the mentioned detail of lack of native mixed reality.