Pico Neo 2 Eye review: the new best enterprise standalone headset

The time has come for me to review the Pico Neo 2 Eye, the Chinese competitor of the Oculus Quest (that has been kindly sent to me from Pico)! Discover with me everything about it and especially how does it compare with the Oculus Quest and the HTC Vive Focus Plus.

Pico Neo 2 Eye Video Review

If you are a tl;dr guy (or girl), probably you would rather watch a video of me speaking about the Pico Neo 2 Eye instead of reading thousands of words. And for this reason, your favorite ghost has prepared a nice review video for you! Enjoy it here below!

Specifications

The Pico Neo 2 Eye is the second iteration of the Pico Neo series by Chinese vendor Pico. It is a 6DOF standalone headset with inside out positional tracking and magnetically tracked controllers. The word “Eye” stays there to remember us that this headset includes integrated eye-tracking out of the box. There is also a version of the Pico Neo 2 that doesn’t feature eye tracking.

These are its specs:

• CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 845
• Display: 3,840 × 2,160 LCD (1,920 × 2,160 per eye)
• IPD Adjustment: software only (55mm–71mm IPD)
• Refresh Rate: 75Hz
• FOV: 101 degrees
• RAM: 6GB
• Storage: 128GB (expandable with SD Card)
• Audio: speakers built-in the headband + 3.5mm jack for external headphones
• Controllers: 6DOF motion controllers, based on sensor fusion of electromagnetic (EM) and inertial measurement unit (IMU)
• Tracking: inside-out with 2 front cameras
• Eye-tracking: integrated, with Tobii technology
• Connectivity: Bluetooth, Wifi, USB
• Weight: 360g

Unboxing

I know that your secret fetish is watching me opening boxes of headsets, and that’s why I made a video with the full unboxing of the Pico Neo 2 Eye that you can find on Youtube!

I have to say that the Pico Neo 2 Eye has been packaged very well: when you open the box you see the headset, controllers, and accessories arranged in a very ordered manner. It surprised me, I expected a worse packaging and instead, it was very nice.

In the box you can find:

• The headset
• Two hand controllers
• Two laces to attach the controllers to your wrists
• Some useless pamphlets with the instructions, warranty, security rules
• A cloth to clean the lenses
• Two power adapters
• One cable to charge the headset
• One cable to charge both controllers together (biggest innovation ever)

Design

The Pico Neo 2 Eye feels quite elegant with its grey and black colors. It is visually more appealing than the Pico Neo 1 that I tried one year ago. Even the materials and the attention to the design feels much better: the mix of plastic, leatherette, and fabric make the headset nicer to be seen, and also more comfortable to be worn. But to be really beautiful, truly elegant, it lacks something: I can clearly spot in its design the signs of the practical Chinese style, while it would need a bit of Italian artistic style to be something that you would really crave to wear on your head. The Oculus Quest, in comparison, with its total-black color and its cover in fabric feels much more like an elegant cloth to wear.

On the front side of the device, you can see the typical dual-color design of the Pico Neo headsets (that personally I don’t like much), with a low black stripe highlighting the two tracking cameras. On the top of the front plate, you can find the air vent, that emits warm air when you start using the headset too much.

On the left side there is, well… this is embarassing… pretty nothing apart from a Pico logo.

On the right side, there are three buttons that can be used in spite of the ones of the controllers: the home button, the confirmation button, and the back button. These are very useful in demos where you don’t want to give hand controllers to people, while are quite useless while you play at home.

On the back, there is the rotating knob, used to fit the headset. The back is pretty big because it includes the headset battery, that is on the back to counterbalance the heavy weight of the front of the device.

From the top, you can see the top fitting strap (more on this later on), the turn on/off button (a bit too little for my tastes, it is sometimes hard to find it while you have the headset on your head), and the USB-C port.

On the bottom side, there are many things: the volume up/down buttons, the microphone, an SD-Card slot, and the 3.5mm jack for your external headphones (if you need some a-ehm, “VR Privacy”).

On the inside of the headset, you find the facemask in leatherette, the light sensor, and the Fresnel lenses. Around the lenses, there are two rings that are bigger than usual because there is where eye-tracking sensors are installed. In the internal part of the lateral sticks of the headband, you can find the speakers of the integrated audio.

Visuals

The visuals are where the Pico Neo 2 Eye shines. The 4K display gives you a resolution of 1,920 × 2,160 pixels per eye that is higher than the one of the competition that only offers 1,600 x 1,440. If in the Quest you can see the pixels, on the Pico Neo 2 you usually can not, also because its LCD display has a better fill factor than the one manufactured by Oculus. I’m not saying that the SDE is not there, but it is low, and the grid of pixels becomes more a sensation than something clearly visible. You have to really focus to see the pixels in some scenes.

The LCD display has also pretty bright colors, and even if the black is not so deep like with OLED screens, it is black enough to satisfy my needs.

The lenses are also good, with a decent sweet spot, and not bright god rays. More than the god rays, sometimes I can spot circular glares, especially within black scenes containing some bright elements. The FOV of 101° is more or less in line with the one of the other headsets. All in all, the optics felt good to me.

The only problem with the visuals is the chromatic aberration: the more your eyes go further from the forward direction and start looking at the periphery of the vision, the more you see the red, green and blue colors separating, and you see rainbows coming out from the pixels. This is a problem that the god John Carmack has solved on Oculus devices, but that Pico has not solved yet.

When you wear the Pico Neo 2, the first thing that you think is “Woah”, and returning to the Quest later on seems like returning back in the past with some old technology. Display-wise, it’s the same that you feel going back from the Valve Index to the Rift CV1. The display has a so big pixel density that you can’t avoid loving it. Probably this is the reason why Oculus is going to produce a Quest S: to create a device that offers a similar fill-factor sensation.

Comfort

Comfort is another feature for which the Pico Neo 2 clicked with me. I mean, it is not perfect: the headset still feels a bit unbalanced on the front and hurts a bit the upper region of my nose, but it is pretty good. And also the setup is very easy, thanks to the very practical rear knob. Regarding all these points, the Pico Neo is far superior to the rather uncomfortable Oculus Quest.

The comfort is very good because of these reasons:

• Pico has installed two cushions: one on the facemask of the device, and the other one on the back, that touches your nape. This way you have comfort sensations on all parts of your head;
• The choice of the materials from Pico has been very good: the cushions are not soft nor hard, but of the right stiffness;
• The leatherette material adheres to the forehead very well, it is like if it sticks to it, so the headset is very stable and doesn’t move during your VR sessions;
• The leatherette material is not a sponge, so it soaks less in sweat during your VR sessions;
• Thanks to the fact that the headset battery is on the back, it can counterweight the weight of all the electronics on the front, for a better balancing on your head. This way the device doesn’t exert too much pressure on your face.

Furthermore, the procedure to wear it is very simple: at first, you decide one of the two available sizes for the top rubber band, using a quite weird mechanism that seems the one of the belts, where you secure one element inside a hole to decide the size (see the picture above); then, you have just to put the headset on your head and close the knob. That’s it. No weird straps like on the Quest.

https://gfycat.com/ornateecstaticchick

As I said above, the comfort is quite good, and probably for my head, it is better than all the other standalone headsets I have tried.

Controllers

The Pico Neo 2 comes with two 6 DOF hand controllers. These controllers don’t try to copy the design of Oculus Touch like many companies are doing nowadays, but they look more like wands. Personally, I don’t agree with this choice, considering that Touch-like controllers are becoming a standard de-facto, but I can live with it.

The controllers feel a bit heavy, probably because they host inside a rechargeable battery, but they are well balanced. Their form is curved ergonomically, but actually the ergonomics is pretty disappointing because to keep the fingers on all the buttons (the thumbstick, the trigger, and the grip buttons), the fingers remain slightly in tension all the time and this is absolutely not good for the comfort of the user. This should be improved in future iterations of the device.

On the top of the controllers, you can find a thumbstick, with around it they typical X-Y buttons and a back button. Below it, there is the Home button, probably the button you click the most of time since it is used to return to the main menu, to trigger the quick menu, and to recenter the headset. On one of the sides of the controllers there is another button, the grip button. On the back there is the trigger, that you can press with your index finger.

Controllers’ feeling is more or less ok, but what I personally love is that they are rechargeable via USB-C, so you won’t spend all your income to buy batteries for them. The battery is also pretty durable, and I never found myself with no power in the controllers during my tests. I even love more that Pico provides you a cable that converts a USB-A port to two USB-C ones, so that you can charge together both controllers with a single charger. This is probably the innovation that I loved the most of this device… it is so practical!

One thing that is pretty annoying is that the controllers get warm during usage, even in medium-length VR sessions. I don’t know if it is because of the battery or the tracking technology.

A final word on this topic… the upper part of the back of each controller looks like a duck, while the lower part like a Panda. After you have seen them once, you can’t come back.

The controllers of the Pico Neo 2 are tracked using electromagnetical signals (or better, a fusion of EM data and IMU data) thanks to the reference design developed by Atraxa.

Tracking

The positional tracking of the Pico Neo 2 还可以 (is more or less ok). Using only two front cameras for the positional tracking is so 2018, and I expected at least 4 to have more tracking stability (even if here the cameras do not perform the tracking of the controllers). The resulting positional tracking works, but it is not completely fluid, and you can clearly perceive a very slight lag and especially the continuous stuttering that makes it not smooth. There is also some drift after long usage, even if it is not big. If you are very sensitive to motion sickness, I think you can’t use the Pico Neo 2 for a long period of time.

The Guardian system of the Pico also works quite well, but in an area that is far more limited than the one of the Quest: 3m x 3m vs 7m x 7m. Pico runtime also tries to remember the play area that you set before in the room you are in, and this system sometimes work, some other times not, exactly as with the Quest.

The tracking of the controllers has a similar quality. It is good, but it feels like it is heavily filtered, so it lags a bit behind the real position. It is not something that you can actually measure, but your brain understands that there is something not correct with the movement of the controllers. Also if you keep the controllers steady in one position, you can see that they slowly wobble, and so they are not completely fixed. This means that the Neo 2 isn’t suitable for applications where a very precise tracking of the hand position is needed, or that it can give problems with experiences needing the fastest tracking possible (like Beat Saber on the worst Expert+ songs), but for 95% of enterprise applications, that usually are just slow training experiences, it is more than enough.

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Regarding the tracking, the Oculus Quest wins completely against the Neo 2 in everything… if not for one big detail. The Neo 2 doesn’t use optical tracking for the controllers like the Quest, but it employs magnetical tracking. This is something rather original for a headset, and even if it makes the Neo 2 sensible to magnetical interferences (or it can give problems in rooms full of metals), it gives it the incredible advantage that the controllers are tracked everywhere: in front of the headset, behind your head, behind your back, very close to the headset’s faceplate, etc… It is impressive how the tracking always works, even when you are not looking at the controllers at all.

A final word on the tracking: for whatever weird reason, sometimes if I activate an experience using eye-tracking, the positional tracking gets crazy and I have to reboot the headset. This is a bug that I hope will be fixed soon.

Audio

Audio is provided in the Pico Neo 2 by two tiny speakers embedded in the lateral sticks of the headband, close to your ears, in a way similar to what happens with all the other standalone headsets on the market.

As I always say, I am not a big expert in audio… and for a regular user like me, the quality of the embedded speakers of the Pico Neo 2 is more than enough. Probably some purists may say that they are low in basses or something like that, but again, for the typical enterprise usage, they are more than enough.

There is also a 3.5mm jack on the bottom if you want to attach your headphones. This can be useful for two reasons: one is to attach isolating headphones for having a higher-quality audio experience, and the second one is

Battery

I can’t find any official mention of the duration of the battery on the Pico Neo 2, but from my experience, it is pretty disappointing. While the controllers hold the charge quite well, the headset drains the battery quite fast, especially if you are performing some video recording, wireless streaming, or other similar intensive operations. From my tests, the battery lasts less than two hours, probably even one hour and a half. It is a bit little for enterprise use, and I would advise the owners of a Pico Neo 2 to buy some power bank.

Initial Setup

The stereotype about Chinese people says that they are very good at copying. Probably at Pico, many people know about this, and that’s why they have decided to clearly copy Oculus in the room setup procedure. I mean, they have even copied the colors used for the identification of controllers…

The setup of the headset is pretty straightforward: you turn on the device, you turn on the controllers and the controllers get immediately recognized. After that you have the room-scale setup of Ocul…ehm, you have a room-scale setup where you can decide between a stationary setup and a room-scale one. After that, you select the floor height with one of your controllers, and then if you chose room-scale, you can draw on the floor your tracking area. The mechanism of drawing is less smart than the one of Oculus, and if you draw a weird shape, it gets discarded from the system. Another problem is that the allowed maximum tracking area is around 3m x 3m, which is long less than a half than the one offered by Oculus. You can later on disable the tracking limits for a single session, but it is just allowed as a development test.

After you set up the room, you find yourself in the Pico Neo 2 Main Menu and you are ready to go. Easy Peasy.

User Interface

Regarding the user experience inside the menus of the Pico Neo 2 there isn’t much to say. You have your 3D home space, where you can just customize the 360 background, and then you have a 2D menu with the buttons to launch the apps. There are also various system menus to configure the Wi-fi, the controllers or to change all the systems settings. One thing that is not clearly written is that if you tap two times the Home button, you can open a quick system menu that proposes special features like screen recording.

You can have a tour with me inside the Pico Neo 2 UI by watching this video:

As you can see, it is a pretty standard interface for a VR headset. It is not bad and has nothing special… it is good enough for enterprise usage, making the user arriving straight to the point without too many eye candies.

Content

The Pico Neo 2 proposes few pre-installed applications that act as showcases of what is possible to do with the headset:

• Some tech demos about eye tracking;
• ENGAGE to show that it is possible to use it for virtual events;
• An enterprise application about insurance;
• Oh Shape to showcase its potentiality in the entertainment scene;
• Some viewers of 360 videos;
• Some editors of 360 content;
• Etc…

Most of the apps are short and/or boring. I have even made a funny video with me “having fun” inside the Pico Neo 2 Eye and its preinstalled experiences. Discover some hidden gems by watching it!

The Pico Neo also offers the Pico Store to download new experiences, but they are quite a few: there are only 3 pages about games. It pales in comparison with Oculus Store + SideQuest and even if compared with Viveport (that is anyway supported by the headset).

So let’s be honest: this headset has almost no interesting content available, but that’s very ok because it is an enterprise headset: it has been made so that companies can buy the headsets and install on them their applications. If you want a device to play Beat Saber, you buy the Quest. This is made for business entities.

Special features

The Pico Neo 2 features some interesting features worth a mention.

Integrated recording

Clicking two times the Home menu on your controllers, you can open a special menu offering various functionalities, among which the possibility to record what happens on the display. It is amazing that the recording works well, also records audio, can automatically also record your microphone (something the Quest doesn’t do), records in 16:9 out of the box and can also record the passthrough scenes.

Automatic passthrough when out of the play area

Exactly like the Quest, the Neo 2 shows your surroundings in black and white with the passthrough when you go out from your room-scale area.

Eye tracking

The Pico Neo 2 Eye features eye-tracking technology by Tobii: it can detect where you are looking at and when your eyelids close. There are no experiences that make you test it extensively, only some tech demos, but from my tests, I got the same impression that I have had in all these years while trying eye-tracking solutions. Great, I love it, but not ready for the mass market.

https://gfycat.com/immaculatedazzlingblackbear

I mean, the eye tracking works quite well if you perform the calibration of the eyes (that is a nuisance requiring you to follow with your eyes a dot moving on the screen), but it doesn’t always work. As Michael Abrash said, a mouse can’t work 90% of times, and so an input mechanism should always work to be really useful. Eye tracking is still not that perfect, especially if you look at the periphery of your vision (up, down, left or right), and with “not perfect” I mean that it is not exactly precise, it spots a slightly different direction from the one you are looking at. Sometimes also the eyelid detector detected my eyes closed when they were open.

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Anyway, I see a big potential in eye tracking to create new intuitive interfaces (that can also help disabled people), to offer better avatars for social VR interactions, and to allow for better graphical quality of VR experiences thanks to foveated rendering. Pico Neo 2 Eye already supports foveated rendering, but there was no demo about it, so I can’t judge how it works. Anyway, the company claims that it can reduce a lot the computational burden of the various VR applications.

SteamVR streaming

With the Pico Neo 2 you can connect your headset wirelessly to your PC to play SteamVR games. Something similar to Virtual Desktop for Quest, Riftcat VRidge for cardboards, Viveport Streaming for the Vive Focus Plus, etc…

It is a nice feature that you can play your SteamVR games with your standalone headset, completely free from wires. But while the idea is good, the realization falls short for the same problems that haunt all these wireless solutions:

• There is a perceivable latency (more or less in line with the one of Viveport Streaming);
• If you don’t have a powerful Wi-fi router, you start seeing artifacts, glitches, stutterings, and other similar problems;
• To have the smoothest experience possible, you have to lower the quality of the streaming, and this gives you a poor graphical experience, with many visible compression artifacts.

I have tried it in two different places with two different routers and I have never been completely satisfied. In one place, I managed to play Beat Saber and win the level, but with a very low visual quality, in the other case, I couldn’t even go beyond the beginning of the level for the too many missed blocks. Your mileage may vary, but all in all a wired solution like the Oculus Link is still the best you can use with your standalone headset. That’s why Pico is also offering in beta a tethered streaming solution.

I think Pico had a nice idea, but the road towards wireless streaming is still long.

Enterprise opportunities

Pico Neo 2 is an enterprise headset, and it is with the enterprise that it really shines. Its price is inferior to the one of the enterprise version of the Quest, and it is more powerful. Pico gives more freedom to its customers and also offers through partners dedicated support and various applications that can already help you in customizing the Pico Neo to fulfill the needs of your company. Pico has a long track in offering enterprise services, and it is a company that you can trust in this sense. Oculus has just started, and is still better in managing consumers.

One last word about China: Pico is a Chinese company, so you can use their headsets also in China, thing that it is not possible (at least in an easy way) for the Oculus Quest.

Pico Neo 2 Eye vs Oculus Quest

The Pico Neo 2 is better than the Quest because:

• It has more computational power;
• It has better graphics (4K display);
• It is more comfortable;
• It costs less if you target the enterprise market;
• Pico is more reliable than Oculus in the enterprise stage;
• It features integrated eye tracking;
• It can track controllers even behind the player.

The Quest is better than the Pico Neo 2 because:

• It offers better tracking;
• It has less chromatic aberrations in the display;
• It is more polished;
• It has far more content;
• It is upgrading at a crazy speed;
• It is backed by a solid company like Facebook;
• It is far cheaper for consumer usage.

Summarizing: buy the Quest if you are a consumer (the added value of the content is so high), buy the Neo 2 if you are a company.

Pico Neo 2 Eye vs Vive Focus Plus

The Pico Neo 2 is better than the Vive Focus Plus because:

• It has more computational power;
• It has better graphics (4K display);
• It is a bit more comfortable;
• It costs less in the version without eye tracking;
• It features integrated eye tracking;
• It offers better controllers tracking;
• It can track controllers even behind the player.

The Vive Focus Plus is better than the Pico Neo 2 because:

• It is cheaper than the version of the Pico Neo 2 with eye tracking;
• It can offer applications in mixed reality like our game HitMotion: Reloaded;
• Viveport has a better content catalog;
• The wireless streaming feature is better integrated into the UI of the headset.

Summarizing: the Pico Neo 2 is a newer device, and so it is better in almost everything than the Vive Focus Plus. There are still cases like the mixed reality that keep the Focus Plus somewhat relevant in small niches, though.

Price and availability

The Pico Neo 2 and Pico Neo 2 Eye are available on Pico website (or through authorized distributors) for $700 (standard version) and $900 (eye-tracking version).

Final considerations

The Pico Neo 2 Eye is a very good standalone headset for enterprise usage. It doesn’t shine for its level of polish, because for instance, the tracking of the headset and the controllers could be better and its battery duration is a bit too short. But it feels like an improvement over its competition on many sides: computational power, comfort, controllers’ tracking range, and so on. It also features innovative cutting-edge features like wireless streaming and eye tracking. It is a good refresh over the Oculus Quest.

I think it is a very interesting device especially if you are looking for a 6 DOF standalone headset for enterprise usage.

Should you buy it?

I’ll keep this answer very short:

• If you need a device for consumers, no. Oculus Quest is much cheaper ($400) and has much more high-quality gaming content. The Quest has no competitors in the consumer space at the moment;
• If you need a device for enterprise use, yes. The Pico Neo 2 (Eye or Not) is probably the best enterprise 6 DOF headset you can find today on the market.

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And after more than 4000 words, this review is over! If you appreciated it, could you please help me in informing by community by sharing it on your social media channels? And of course, feel free also to ask me whatever questions you want about the Pico Neo 2 in the comments section here below!