DreamWorld

DreamWorld
Information
Type	Private
Industry	Augmented Reality
Founded	2016
Founder	Kevin Zhong
Headquarters	California, United States
Notable Personnel	Kevin Zhong (CEO)
Products	Tethered and standalone AR glasses
Website	https://www.dreamworldvision.com

DreamWorld (also branded Dreamworld AR and trading as Dreamworld USA Inc., with its hardware sold under the Dream Glass name) is an American augmented reality company that designs and sells AR smart glasses. It was founded in 2016 and is based in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company is led by founder and chief executive Kevin Zhong, who holds a Ph.D. in physiological optics earned in 2011 and previously worked at General Electric and at the AR firm Meta before starting the company. DreamWorld positions itself around a "Tech for People" philosophy, with the stated goal of bringing affordable AR hardware to a mass market rather than the enterprise-priced devices that dominated the field at the time.

DreamWorld's products are head-worn glasses that show a large floating virtual screen using birdbath optics, in the same broad category as later media-focused AR glasses from companies such as Xreal and Viture. The early models tethered to a phone, PC, or game console for processing, while later models added their own onboard computing. The company has funded most of its launches through crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and by 2022 it said it had shipped more than 15,000 AR headsets worldwide.

History

DreamWorld was founded in 2016 by Kevin Zhong. Its first product, the Dream Glass, was put up for pre-order in June 2018 as an immersive, 3D content-focused AR headset aimed largely at developers. It was notable mainly for its price: at an early-bird cost of 399 US dollars (619 US dollars at full retail), it undercut comparable wide field-of-view headsets of the era, such as the Meta 2, by a wide margin.

In August 2019 the company launched its first consumer-targeted device, the DreamGlass Air, on Kickstarter. Where the original headset chased immersive 3D content, the Air was reframed as a portable "private theater" for watching video and playing games on a big virtual screen. The campaign was an immediate success: it reached its 15,000 US dollar goal within minutes and finished having raised about 1.01 million US dollars from roughly 2,980 backers.

The company followed with the Dream Glass 4K, announced in July 2020 and billed as a portable, private AR headset with a 200-inch virtual screen that could plug into smartphones, drones, and major game consoles. In 2021 it moved beyond tethered designs with the DreamGlass Lead line, standalone all-in-one glasses with their own processor, storage, and a custom interface the company called Dream OS. Its 2022 product, the Dream Glass Flow, returned to a lightweight tethered approach focused on gaming.

Technology

DreamWorld's glasses present a bright virtual display that appears to float roughly two meters in front of the wearer, which the company describes as reducing eye strain compared with looking at a nearby phone or laptop screen. The early DreamGlass models combined this display with sensors for interaction: a 1080p front-facing RGB camera with a microphone, an infrared camera for tracking the hands, and support for hand gestures such as pinch, hold, release, and return on both hands. Tracking on the first DreamGlass was three degrees of freedom for the head plus marker-based positional tracking, with six-degrees-of-freedom tracking described as in development.

The original DreamGlass relied entirely on a connected device for computing power, drawing on a PC over a pair of USB 3.0 connections plus HDMI, or on an Android phone over USB Type-C using a separate battery adapter. Later glasses shifted the balance: the DreamGlass Air paired the headset with a small Android-powered computing unit, and the standalone Lead models built the computer into the device itself, running on Qualcomm Snapdragon chips with the company's Dream OS software. The Dream Glass Flow took the connectivity in another direction, using Wi-Fi 6 with a 2x2 MIMO antenna setup to stream content wirelessly from consoles, PCs, and cloud gaming services to glasses the company said weighed only about 59 grams. Across the lineup, DreamWorld has offered a Unity-based software development kit for building AR applications.

Products

DreamWorld's catalog has moved from immersive, developer-oriented AR headsets toward lighter media and gaming glasses, with a detour into standalone all-in-one models. The table below lists the company's main products.

Product	Year	Type	Notable specs and notes
Dream Glass	2018	Tethered AR headset	First product; 90-degree FOV; 2.5K resolution at 60Hz; about 240 g; hand-gesture and marker-based tracking; 399 US dollars early bird (619 US dollars retail); tethers to PC or Android phone
DreamGlass Air	2019	Tethered display glasses	Consumer "private theater"; 90-degree FOV at 18:9; 2.5K resolution; about 142-150 g; roughly 5-hour battery; paired with an Android computing unit; 269 US dollars early bird (489 US dollars retail); raised about 1.01 million US dollars on Kickstarter
Dream Glass 4K	2020	Tethered display glasses	200-inch virtual screen; 1920x1080 per eye; 3DoF tracking; plug-and-play into phones, consoles, PCs, and drones; launched on Indiegogo July 2020
DreamGlass Lead / Lead Pro / Lead Plus	2021-2022	Standalone AR glasses	All-in-one design with onboard processor, storage, and Dream OS; Lead Pro and Lead Plus use a Qualcomm Snapdragon 670; 90-degree FOV; ~5300 mAh battery for about 3.5 hours; Lead Pro adds 6DoF and a Unity SDK for enterprise use
Dream Glass Flow	2022	Tethered gaming glasses	1920x1080 per eye; 120-inch virtual screen; about 59 g; Wi-Fi 6 with 2x2 MIMO for wireless streaming; works with PlayStation and Xbox Remote Play, cloud gaming, Nintendo Switch, and Steam Deck; about 379 US dollars early bird on Indiegogo

Market position

DreamWorld was an early entrant in the low-cost consumer AR glasses category, arriving before the wider wave of media-focused glasses from Xreal (then Nreal), Viture, and others. Its pitch from the first DreamGlass onward was that it could deliver a wide field of view and a large virtual screen at a fraction of the price of enterprise headsets, and it leaned on crowdfunding to bring each new model to market. By the time it launched the Dream Glass Flow in 2022, the company said it had shipped more than 15,000 AR headsets worldwide and described itself as among the more established names in the small consumer AR market.