After I published my detailed review of the Vivo Vision headset, many people asked me how it compares with another interesting Chinese mixed reality headset: the Play For Dream MR. At that moment, I realized that I had never published my review of Play For Dream: I had the opportunity of trying the headset for a couple of days while I was in China, took a lot of notes, but never translated them into an article. Today, I’m correcting that mistake and publishing my impressions of the Play For Dream MR headset. I hope you’ll enjoy them!
[A bunch of disclaimers before we start:
- Play For Dream lent me the headset for a few days so that I could write the review. No monetary compensation of any kind was provided, though
- I tried the headset for a couple of days: it was enough to get a grasp of how the headset was, but it was probably not enough for a detailed review. Consider this post a middle ground between a “first impressions” article and a “full review”
- I tried the headset in June. Most of the things have stayed the same, but some updates may have fixed some software problems in the meantime. I had to return my headset, so I can not verify how it works today. Be warned that a couple of things may be outdated. Sorry for my mistake of not publishing the review before!]
Play For Dream MR
The Play For Dream MR is the third headset by the company now referred to as Play For Dream, and that was previously known as YVR. The Play For Dream was mostly considered at its launch as a “Vision Pro ripoff”, but at CES 2025, many XR professionals and content creators (me included) quickly realized that, while certainly inspired by the Vision Pro, it was definitely a good headset. I selected it as my “best of CES”, and so did other XR people, like Amanda Watson.
At CES, we could just try the device for a few minutes, which is not enough to write some detailed impressions on the device. Luckily, in a recent trip to China, I had the opportunity to visit the company, interview its people, and also try the headset for a few days. The more detailed tests I could do confirmed that this is definitely one of the most interesting MR headsets of 2025, but it also has some notable drawbacks. You can read about its pros and cons in the remainder of this article.
Specifications
- Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2
- Display
- Type: Micro-OLED
- Resolution: 3840×3552 per eye
- Pixel density: 3882 PPI
- Refresh rate: 90 Hz
- Lenses
- Audio
- Microphones: 4 Omnidirectional Microphones
- Speakers: 2 Stereo Speakers
- Comfort
- Weight: 650g
- IPD: 51mm-78mm (automatic adjustment)
- Connectivity: WiFi 7, Bluetooth BT5.3
- Storage: 512GB
- Cameras and sensors:
- Color Passthrough Camera
- Passthrough latency: 14ms
- Outward Tracking Cameras
- Eye-Tracking Cameras
- Depth Camera
- Accelerometer
- Gyroscope
- Wear Detection Sensor
- Color Passthrough Camera
Unboxing
I was able to properly unbox the device, and you can see the related video here:
I think Play For Dream did a good job in packaging its headset. There is nothing incredibly fancy or special (like Meta Quest 3S’s self-opening box), but the box felt elegant, and the way the elements were put inside was tidy. The fact that it was all black also gave a classy touch to the whole package. It was a pleasant unboxing experience for me.
Design
Regarding design and many other things, Play For Dream MR feels like the mix of a Vision Pro with a Quest Pro. Even just looking at it, you may feel some Vision Pro vibes, with the glossy front face, the many tracking cameras, and the use of fabric. But you can also recognize some traits of the Quest Pro, especially through the black color of the device and the rigid strap.
In general, thanks to the black color and the glossy front, the headset feels elegant. But it still feels like a VR headset, and it looks different than the purely MR headsets like the Apple Vision Pro or the Vivo Vision.
Let’s have a look at it. On the front of the device, apart from my funny reflection, you can see its many tracking cameras.
From the top, you can appreciate the rigid strap, together with the main “crown” button, and another button that is used, for instance, to shoot spatial videos.
From the bottom view, you can see other tracking cameras, the two speakers on the lateral frames, and you can appreciate more in general the comfort system of the device.
On the left and right sides, there is not much to see, except for the shape of the device.
From the back, you can see the crown dial, which, when rotated, makes the strap tighten or loosen around your head.
Visuals
Thanks to its 3840×3552 per eye resolution, the Play For Dream can deliver very good visuals. The definition is great, and there is no sign of the screen door effect. This makes the headset ideal to watch high-definition movies, as I’ve already said for devices with a similar definition like Apple Vision Pro and Vivo Vision.
Play For Dream, anyway, has a few problems that haunt its visual quality, with the worst being chromatic aberration. Chromatic aberration happens when the image on the screen of the headset goes through the lenses, and the colors of the pixels get divided into their RGB components. Long story short, you start seeing rainbows in some parts of the image. For instance, this is a through-the-lens shot I’ve taken while using the device.
Let me zoom in on the corner of the window portrayed in this image for you.
Can you see it? The border, which should probably just be a black line enclosing a white square, has become a mix of blue-ish colors. This is chromatic aberration at work, and it is very visible in the Play For Dream MR.
I was pretty disappointed by this, because it is really visible and it ruins your experience with the headset. But then, luckily, my friend Tyriel Wood informed me that there is a way to get rid of it. If you go to the LAB section of the Settings of the device, you can find an option to enable the 4K resolution and another one to enable 90Hz refresh rate. If you do that, the chromatic aberrations improve a lot. I wonder if, in the meantime, this option has been enabled by default in some software updates, because it dramatically improves the experience with the device. Anyway, since there is no free lunch, this option has the big drawback of making the battery drain faster.
If you just do this, anyway, the aberrations won’t completely go away. To make them disappear, you also have to fit the headset better. With the default facemask I had with the device, I did not have a proper fit, and so I had to put the headset in a particular way so that my eyes fell in the eyebox of the lenses. The moment I discovered how to do that, I could finally enjoy the headset in its full resolution. But I had to pay some price in terms of comfort, because I had to keep the headset in a position that was a bit unnatural. I saw Tyriel Wood 3D-printing a custom facemask to overcome this problem, and I know the company was also trying to create a new comfort mask for the same reason. I wonder if the problem comes from the fact that comfort was mostly designed for Asian heads.
Another noticeable problem is related to spherical aberrations. This means that in the periphery of the lenses, visuals get pretty blurred. I’ve noticed that this affected mostly the left, right, and bottom parts of the visuals, while the top was less affected. Spherical aberrations reduce the perceived FOV of the device. While the nominal 103° definitely feels ok, the fact that the periphery of the visuals is blurred makes the perceived FOV less than that. Nothing tragic on this side, though: this is a problem that I also noticed on the Vivo Vision.
The last issue for me was some “internal reflections” I could see while looking at a certain type of content, like a full black background with a few white elements. They were not godrays or glares… they felt more like internal reflections of the optical system. Luckily, they were visible only in some very specific scenes.
In general, once I set up the 4K setting and learned how to fit the device to my face, the visuals appeared good. You can see that from the through-the-lens picture below: the colors were bright, the resolution good, and the text was definitely readable. The eye box, in general, was not generous and not super small.
Comfort
As I’ve already said in the section about the visuals, comfort was not the strongest point of this device for me. The Play For Dream MR has a rigid halo strap that goes around the head, and usually, I never find a proper fit with headsets that make this choice. Rigid straps are indeed rigid, so they don’t adapt well to different shapes of the head and the face. Usually with this type of device, you have to choose between seeing well and having the headset fit well on your head, and as I’ve already said, this is the choice I had to make with Play For Dream MR, too.
So, theoretically, fitting the headset is very easy, because you just have to put it on your face and close the crown on the back to tighten the halo around your head. But in reality, you spend much more time trying to find a compromise between good comfort and good visuals. You can see me wearing the headset in the short video below: I wear it, and then I have to adjust it until I find my fit.
The facemask also did not have an ideal shape for my face, so I could not make my face rest properly on it. As I’ve said above, this seems to be a problem with this headset in general, and a new facemask is needed to guarantee a better fit.
To make things worse, the way the facemask is attached to the main body of the device is pretty weird. There is not only one facemask: there is a face gasket that is attached to the headset via magnets, and then there is the actual facemask that is attached with other magnets to the gasket.
This castle of magnetically attached things could even potentially work well if the magnets were strong enough. But they are not, so a lot of times it happened to me that while I was trying to fit the headset to see the visuals properly, the face gasket detached from the headset body, making my headset slip off. You can even see it happening at the end of my unboxing video, when I put the headset back on my face, and then it slips badly, and so I say “Oh my God, no”:
At least, a plus on the comfort section is that the device features mechanical IPD adjustment, so it adapts well to the eyes of the users. Like on the Vision Pro, you put the headset on your face, you press the crown, and you can hear a quite noisy motor moving the lenses for you. This mechanism worked pretty well for me.
If you have eye impairments, you can also get some prescription lenses to be able to use your headset without having to wear glasses, as it happens with all the most famous headsets.
Controllers
The controllers of the Play For Dream MR have a pretty original drop-like shape. I personally liked it a lot: it is original and differentiates itself from all the other controllers, which all look too much inspired by the Quest Touch. They are pretty small and lightweight, too. A good thing about the weight is that most of their weight is on the main body of the controller, the part that you take in your hand, and that is close to your wrist. This is a good choice for balancing them, because that part is closer to the joint of your hand, and it is where your hand has more strength. The result is that the controllers feel very well in your hands.
As for the controls, they are the usual ones we expect from all VR controllers: a system button, two main A/B buttons, a thumbstick, a grip button, and a trigger button for each controller. You can see some pictures of them below.
If I had to pick one thing I didn’t like about the controllers, it is the grip button: first of all, it is a clickable on/off button and not an analog one. Plus, it did not fit well in my hand: the button should have been put a bit above its actual position to be comfortable to press.
Another thing I liked, instead, is the status LED: there is a circular light around the thumbstick that changes color depending on the status of the controller: it is blue while you are playing, orange while the controllers are charging, and green when they are fully charged.
Controllers have an internal battery and can be charged via USB.
In general, the controllers are one of the things I liked the most about this headset. And the fact that there are controllers shows that this headset is not just a Vision Pro clone: Vision Pro has no controllers by default (even if you can use PSVR 2 ones, now), and Vivo Vision has neither. This is because Play For Dream is meant to play games, so it needs to have controllers, while the other two headsets are more meant to enjoy media, so they can be shipped without them.
Tracking
On the tracking side, the main things worked well for me, but the experimental ones worked a bit less.
The positional tracking of the headset was very solid, and so was the tracking of the controllers. I tried to break the tracking of the controllers by putting one in front of the others or doing some other tricky tests, but with no luck: they always tracked very well, and did not snap when entering the field of view. It’s impressive considering that Play For Dream claims that this algorithm is proprietary. The headset performed very well for use in room-scale VR.
Eye tracking and hand tracking were not as good, though. The eye tracking pointer was not always good enough to select what I wanted to interact with (I’ll talk about that in the UX section). And hand tracking had literally lots of issues, including lag, tracking loss, and pose misdetection. That’s why the company was planning an update to fix it. I don’t know if it has already been released, but for sure, it would be beneficial, because the hand tracking I tried a few months ago was good only at detecting the hand openly stretched in front of the headset.
Audio
The headset features two speakers embedded in the frames of the device. I always remind you that I’m not an audio expert, but as an average user, I’ve found the audio loud and clear. It is so loud that you can even hear it from outside the device.
As for the integrated microphone, I’ve tried to record myself when saying the tricky “B” and “P” letters, and I had no problems at all. This means that the mics work well.
Performances
Play For Dream MR uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen2+, which is the latest chipset by Qualcomm. Performances seemed good in general: I did not have the occasion to put the device under heavy stress, but from the general usage, both in standalone mode and in PCVR, I did not have any problems. For sure, it can’t compete with the M2 chipset of the Vision Pro, though.
Battery
Play For Dream went for an all-in-one approach and integrated the battery inside the headset. You don’t need to put in your pocket an external battery connected via an annoying cable, like with Apple Vision Pro or Vivo Vision. On paper, this is a great choice for comfort, also because the battery in the back helps in making the headset more balanced.
In reality, this choice has a huge drawback: to put the battery inside the device, they probably had to choose a smaller battery than was necessary, and it drains pretty fast. And when I say fast, I literally mean it: every time you look at the battery indicator, the number has decreased. After 30 minutes of usage, the battery level was already down to 56% and I had just played some simple minigames and interacted with the main menu UI. Usually, after one hour of usage, the battery is gone. This is literally too little to enjoy anything: in an hour, you can not even watch a full movie. This is, in my opinion, the biggest problem of this device: it becomes usable only with a battery pack.
The battery of the controllers seemed better, though: after 30 minutes of usage, the indicator still said 100%.
The device and the controllers can be charged via USB-C ports. I liked that the company already provided in the box a special charger with 2 USB cables having 3 USB-C out ports that let you charge both the headset and the controllers. This is incredibly handy.
Passthrough
The passthrough offered by Play For Dream MR was definitely good, but still a bit worse than the Quest 3 and Vision Pro ones. Passthrough has a good resolution, and it also improves when you enable the “4K” option, but it also shows visible “grain” noise like many other headsets. It has no distortions, though, since it can rely on the images grabbed by the front cameras of the device.
Regarding text readability, in a side-by-side test, Quest 3 resulted in being definitely better. Meta has evolved its passthrough a lot over the years, and probably Play For Dream should do the same. Its passthrough has potential and has to be improved with software updates.
User Experience
Main UX
The main menu of the Play For Dream MR is a copy of the Vision Pro one. There are three lines of circular icons of apps that you can launch. You can select them with your controllers or with gaze-and-pinch, as it happens on the Vision Pro. Gaze and pinch were a bit experimental at the time I tried them, and I had a better experience with controllers.
In general, the UX looked deeply “inspired” by the Vision Pro, but still rougher than the one that Apple created. This is to be expected, since Apple has an obsession with polish that most other companies do not have. Play For Dream has to work to make its interface more classy and polished.
Gaze-and-pinch
In the settings of the Play For Dream, you can enable interaction with the UI via gaze-and-pinch. With that, you can look at the element you want to click with your eyes, and then make an air-tap gesture with the index and thumb fingers of your hand to click on the element.
If you are not new to my blog, you know I’m not a big fan of this solution: eyes are made to look and explore and not to interact, so using them for interactions is unnatural and sometimes frustrating, especially if the tracking does not work as expected, like on this device. In fact, on the contrary of the Vivo Vision, where I could use my eyes and my hands without issues, on Play For Dream I had various problems, which I hope have been resolved since my test.
Eye tracking required the same calibration of the Apple Vision Pro to work. In my tests, it had a visible lag from when I moved my eyes to when the pointer moved. It was also quite noisy, so the pointer moved a bit even if I kept my eyes fixated on a single item. The tracking accuracy was not a big issue for interfaces with big buttons, like the main menu, but it was more relevant when I had to click smaller buttons, like in the browser. To reduce the frustration, I had to enable the visual cursor that showed me with a little dot where the headset thought I was looking at, so at least I knew what I was selecting. Sometimes the eye tracking position was a bit off, so I had to slightly move my head to adjust the pointer to where I wanted it to be. A few times, I also had some phantom clicks happening even if I was not tapping with my hand.
I want to clarify that, in general, the interaction with eye and gaze was okay-ish, it was not that bad. But like Michael Abrash said a few years ago, interactions should work 99.99% of the time… no one would use a mouse that works correctly only 90% of the time, it would be too frustrating. So Play For Dream has to work to improve the performance of its eye tracking and hand tracking engines. Luckily, this can be done by software, and probably it has already been done in part.
Reality Crown
The top button of the headset can be rotated to choose how much real reality vs virtual reality you want, as in the Vision Pro. Rotating the crown, you can make virtual reality occupy only a certain arc in the 360° of vision around you. You can so have the right blend of passthrough vision vs virtual environment that you want. The crown was, anyway, less reactive than on Vision Pro or Vivo Vision: I had to make it complete a full circle before seeing any noticeable effect on my visuals. Probably this should be improved.
When you are in the main menu, this reality blending allows you to choose between the passthrough that makes you aware of the surroundings or a completely virtual environment. These virtual environments were nice, but not comparable at all with the marvels of the Apple Environments.
Content
On the content side, Play For Dream has its own store, like Vivo Vision. And here I’ll comment in a similar way to what I said about Vivo: creating a store is very hard, requires a lot of money and time, so Play For Dream had better run Android XR, so it could rely on the investments in content that Google is going to make. Luckily, a spokesperson of the company told me that Play For Dream is in discussions with Google about this for the next version of the headset.
The current one has a store that is not that exciting, to say the least. There are not many applications on the store, and the majority of them are tech demos or simple games inspired by famous games on the Quest store. Many applications are in Chinese. There are some notable exceptions, though. Play For Dream also managed to attract some portings of good experiences, like Virtual Desktop or In-Death: Unchained.
Interested developers can use a dedicated SDK to create content for the Play For Dream store.
Spatial videos
The headset also allows the recording of spatial memories. The application to do it has a very barebones interface, but it works pretty well. You launch this dedicated app, then press the record button, and at that point, the headset can record a spatial video of what you have in front of you, exactly as it happens on the Vision Pro. I tried to do a couple of videos, and they recorded both the visuals and the audio.
When you select the spatial videos from the gallery, you can choose to watch them in a small square window in front of you, or to watch them in a more immersive way with the video close to you and the rest of the world around you that gets blurred. Both modes are enjoyable.
PCVR
A good thing about the Play For Dream is that it can also be used as a PCVR headset, with good results. There is a dedicated Streaming Assistant app that you can download on your PC, and then you can stream content either using a USB cable or wireless via Wi-Fi.
In China, I had problems using the cable (probably because of conflicts with some software I had to install on my PC while I was there, so it’s not the headset’s fault), but I managed to use wireless streaming without any issues. Streaming worked quite well, and the visuals of the PC games were also pretty good, thanks to the 4K displays of the headset. You can see a through-the-lens image I shot in the SteamVR Home below:
There was a little lag as usual, maybe a bit more noticeable on the controllers, but in general, it was good. This confirmed what I already tried at CES: Play For Dream MR can act as a good PCVR headset. And I think it can be even better thanks to the recent release of Virtual Desktop.
Price and availability
The Play For Dream MR headset is available for $1,999 on the Play For Dream website. The company claims the device ships worldwide, but I’ve been told the headset is still waiting for all the proper certifications for the EU market. If you are interested in buying it, you can follow this (non-affiliate) link: https://pfdm.ai/products/mr-headset
Enterprise version
For all of you who plan to use this very interesting headset for work, there is also enterprise licensing available. The enterprise edition comes for $2,699, with no licensing fees. The additional price comes with some advantages over the standard consumer edition:
- Accessories: extra forehead cushion for more comfort when wearing glasses; or magnetic prescription lenses, in case you want to avoid glasses
- A Western facial interface, to guarantee us Westerners more comfort and a bigger FOV
- 2 years extended warranty
- Enterprise APIs, customizable SDK, and an enterprise device manager to control multiple headsets with just one PC
Talking about the use cases for enterprise, Arden mentioned they usually work with education, workforce training, and healthcare. Some of these sectors choose Play For Dream also because of its integrated eye tracking (which is useful, for instance, to help in treating the “lazy eye” issue).
Final Impressions
My test with the Play For Dream MR confirmed my first impressions from CES: this is definitely a good headset. The visuals have a high resolution, the audio is clear and loud, the performances are good, the tracking works well, the controllers are beautiful, and PCVR usage is satisfying. But they also revealed some drawbacks I did not notice in my first tests: the comfort is sub-optimal, removing chromatic aberrations requires activating an experimental feature, the battery has a ridiculously short duration, hand-eye tracking needs improvements, and the content is very limited. Luckily, most of these problems can be improved with software updates, so if you buy the headset today, you may see it improve over time. In any case, because of its pros and its cons, I think this headset may be suitable for some use cases and less suitable for others.
I think that Play For Dream laid good foundations in this device, and it deserves the attention it got from the XR community. The headset is not perfect, but the company may learn from its errors to shape a second version that may solve its main pain points that can’t be fixed by software, in particular, the comfort and the battery duration. I also hope that the second edition won’t just copy many features from Quest Pro and Vision Pro, but will also be able to bring something more original to the table.
I’m very curious about what Play For Dream will shape for the future: in my opinion, its next headset may definitely be very interesting. I’ll for sure keep an eye on them.
Disclaimer: this blog contains advertisement and affiliate links to sustain itself. If you click on an affiliate link, I’ll be very happy because I’ll earn a small commission on your purchase. You can find my boring full disclosure here.
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