Pico G2 4K Enterprise review: 3DOF VR is not over yet

While Oculus has decided to discontinue the Oculus Go and abandon completely the 3DOF sector, Chinese vendor Pico has decided to double down on 3DOF offering two new models, the Pico G2 4K S and the Pico G2 4K Enterprise, that are two improvements of the original Pico G2 4K. Pico has sent me one Pico G2 4K Enterprise headset and guess what, I‘m writing a full review here for you!

Pico G2 4K Enterprise video review

I know you all are fans of my videos and you can’t live without them, so I have also shot a complete review of the Pico G2 4K enterprise on Youtube. There I show you the device, and highlight the pros and the cons from all standpoints: audio, video, content and even the SDK! Enjoy it

For the usual detailed written review, go on reading the post.

Specifications

The Pico G2 4K Enterprise is just a refresh of the previous Pico G2 and has very similar specifications:

• CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
• 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 on the headset + 3.5mm jack for external headphones
• Controllers: 3DOF remote
• Tracking: 3DOF
• Connectivity: Bluetooth, Wifi, USB
• Battery: 4200mAh, up to 2.5 to 4hours
• Front camera: 16M AF RGB
• Weight: 490g

Unboxing

The Pico G2 4K Enterprise is packaged quite well: nothing special or mindblowing, but an ordered box with the headset, the controller and the accessories inside.

Design

The Pico G2 4K Enterprise is, well, like many other 3DOF headsets out there: it does its job, but it has not a design that makes you go crazy. It features an elegant dark grey color and it has been manufactured with materials that look solid.

On the front of the device, you can see the 16MPixel RGB camera, that has been added to the G2 4K model so that it can be used in some enterprise applications (more on this later on in the article).

There’s only the Pico logo on the left side of the HMD, but looking at the device from this perspective, you can see its fitting system, with the lateral and top headbands.

On the right, you can see the 3 buttons that let you interact with the headset even if you don’t have the controller. From top to bottom: back button, confirmation button, home button. These come very handy when you have to make demos and don’t want to give the controller to every user that must handle the device.

Looking at it from the top, you can see its fitting system. There is a cushion that goes against your nape, that doesn’t only provide more comfort, but also makes the headset more balanced.

On the bottom, the headset features a lot of stuff:

• The speakers of the integrated audio;
• The buttons to change the volume;
• The 3.5mm jack to add your headphones;
• An integrated microphone;
• An SD Card slot;
• The USB-C port to charge it and connect it to the PC;
• A status LED;
• The button to turn it on/off.

It seems that engineers at Pico decided to put everything on the bottom side and ignore all the other ones!

Back view of the headset. You can see from here the back fitting mechanism (well, actually it is not a mechanism, it is just a cushion) and the elegant facemask in leatherette.

Looking inside it, you can see the Fresnel lenses and the light sensor.

Visuals

If the Pico Neo Eye 2 amazed me with its visuals, the Pico G2 4K left me with some disappointments. It features the same fantastic 4K resolution display, but it seems that the problems daunting the Neo 2 are all more noticeable in the G2.

The 4K panel has a very good resolution, and being LCD, also a very good fill factor, with the screen door effect barely noticeable. The colors are slightly washed out, but they are ok. And the refresh rate of 75Hz with FOV of 101° is in line with many other competitors in the market.

The lenses do their job: they’re Fresnel and don’t have many god rays, but when you are in dark scenes with bright elements, you can see some circular glares.

But I have to say I have not been amazed by the overall visuals of this HMD. The problems are mostly these ones:

• Small sweet spot: the area in which I find my head and my eyes comfortable is quite little, and must be found if you want to enjoy VR properly;
• Distortions: when you look around, you see the world slightly distorting with a fishbowl effect. It is very subtle, but noticeable;
• Aliasing: even if the resolution is pretty good, when you are in the home screen you see all the lines being a bit jagged, a clear sign of aliasing. I also noticed it in some apps, it is like the grid of pixels is always a bit noticeable on the edge of the objects. This was completely absent on the Neo 2 and kills a bit the magic of having a 4K display.
• Chromatic aberration: if you don’t look perfectly straight, but start looking towards the edge of the lens, you start seeing the R, G, and B components of the pixels separating, and big rainbows appear in the part of the image that you are looking at. It is much worse than the one that I’ve noticed on the Neo 2;

In the end the visuals are good, and the display is much more immersive than the one of the Oculus Go, but it has its little flaws.

Comfort

Also for the comfort of the headset, I have some mixed feelings. Let’s start with the good things: when you have found your fit, and you wear the headset, it feels pretty comfortable. It is light; it is quite balanced, thanks to the back cushion that counteracts the weight of the front part; it feels good on the head thanks to the cushions that are not too stiff or too soft; it adheres well on the skin, thanks to the material of the facemask so that it doesn’t move while you wear it. All in all, I’m very satisfied with the comfort. It just annoys me a bit on the top of my big western nose, but for the rest, it is good.

The bad thing is actually how to find this comfort. I’ve already told you that the sweet spot is not so large and there is no IPD adjustment, so it is important to fit the headset well, but the fitting system is pretty weird. The top headband can’t be adjusted, but it is fixed in size. The lateral ones don’t use straps, but a system that is similar to the one that backpacks use for the shoulders.

I’ve never loved that system even in backpacks, and using it on a headset is ever more complicated, especially because the lateral bands are a bit elastic, so they don’t slide easily inside the holes of the fitting mechanism. I found it frustrating adjusting the headset for my head size, also because it is impossible to fit it while you have it on your head, but you must remove it to fit it properly. In the end, either it was too tight or too loose on my head.

Long story short: the Pico G2 is comfortable, if you manage to fit it well.

Controller

The Pico G2 uses a standard 3DOF remote. It features a clickable touchpad, the back button and the home button on the top; a trigger button on the bottom; two volume buttons on the right side. It works with 2 AAA batteries.

I won’t go into much details about it, since more or less all 3DOF controllers are the same. It does its job in letting you point at stuff and in your hand is not super-ergonomic like the one of the Oculus Go, but it is ok.

While you use it, sometimes it drifts and you have to re-calibrate it again. When you don’t use the headset for a while, it loses the association and you have re-tap the home button to make the controller and the headset connect again. This operation takes some seconds more than I was used to with the Go.

Audio

The audio is another feature for which I have mixed feelings.

The audio quality is good: I mean, we’re not talking about speakers by Beats, but it is ok for most common uses of a headset.

The problem is the positioning of the speakers: as I have shown you above, they are not in the headband like on the Quest, Go, or Pico Neo 2, but they are on the bottom face of the headset. This means that they are not close to your ears, so the audio is less immersive. Your ear can clearly feel that the audio is coming from somewhere else, and since there is not your head blocking the audio of one speaker to reach the other ear, every ear can also hear the audio destined to the other ear. All the positional audio feature gets messed up by this. It reminded me a bit when I used Gear VR with the speakers of the phone on. A bit better, since here we have two speakers, but anyway it is like the audio comes from a speaker outside the headset. Honestly speaking, I have not loved it much.

Luckily, you can use external headphones with the 3.5mm jack to have truly immersive audio.

Battery

Pico claims that the battery can last up to 4 hours, but in my tests I’ve seen the battery draining pretty fast, reaching 50% in around 1 hour. 4 hours is probably for some simple enterprise applications, but if you play games or experiment with the front camera, expect the duration to be closer to 2-2.5 hours. Consider that the Pico G2 4K Enterprise features already a battery 20% bigger than the one of the Pico G2 4K, so this duration is actually more than the one in the original model.

Hygiene

The Pico G2 4K Enterprise has a new facemask in leatherette that makes it easier to be cleaned. It doesn’t absorb water, so it doesn’t soak up in sweat when people use it, and it can also be washed out with detergents between sessions of different people.

https://gfycat.com/confusedzealousarcticduck

It can also be easily removed to be washed thoroughly and then installed again in a very simple way.

I think this is a great feature, especially in a period like this one where it is fundamental to guarantee the sanitization of the headset in enterprise and LBVR venues.

https://gfycat.com/flashythickbaldeagle

Front camera

The peculiarity of this headset is that it has a 16Mpixel RGB front camera. It is used by the healthcare startup NuEyes, but also by some LBVR venues to re-orient automatically the orientation of the headset (maybe thanks to the use of visual markers), and other things. In the headset, by activating the quick menu, you can also request to see the content of this camera to have some kind of passthrough vision. The visuals of this camera appear exactly like the passthrough mode of the Gear VR. The resolution is good, but not good enough to let you read all the text on your laptop, and there is also a bit of lag. Walking in my house using only this camera to see the surroundings has been a trippy experience.

What is good about this camera is that it has a quite good resolution and that it is undistorted. The camera is not fisheye, so it is much easier to use its frames to detect markers or to run some object detection algorithm. It is easily accessible in the Unity SDK as a standard WebcamTexture, so if you like hacking things, I guess you can have a lot of fun developing things for it!

User Interface

The UI is the same powering the Neo 2, so I’ll copy-paste what I’ve written about it:

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.

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

This is an enterprise headset, so it has been made mostly to let you develop the experiences for your company using the Pico SDK.

In China, it is also considered a consumer headset, and in fact, it has not only one, but two stores pre-installed: the Pico store and Viveport. The Pico store for the G2 offers much more content than the one for the Neo 2: 19 pages of games vs the 3 of the Neo. Viveport has a lot of content too.

Regarding the quality of this content… well, I’ve tried some free games on the Pico store and they had quite a potato quality. There are some paid titles that are famous, though, like Affected. Viveport has a better situation, but in any case, the quality of titles that you can find here is much inferior than the one that you had on the Oculus Store for Go.

SDK

The Pico SDK can be easily accessed from the Pico website: it is available for Unity, UE4 and also for the native Android platform. There is an online documentation with the quick start guide and a full reference of the APIs, and then there is also a GitHub repo with many samples you can learn from.

With the Pico SDK you have everything you need to develop a cool enterprise experience for the Pico G2. There are many APIs that let you do what you want, and thanks to the samples, it is very easy to get started and learn how to do something. For instance, I managed to create an app that takes the image of the front camera and applies it with a certain shader on a cube in a few minutes. It is also cool that there is the way inside Unity to simulate the headset (you can emulate the head rotation, the controllers moving and clicking, etc…), and so you can make some tests about your app without building it. And when you want to build, the device is already unlocked for developers and some basic authorizations in Android are given automatically. That’s great, and really kudos to Pico for this.

The SDK look a bit different than the ones made by Oculus and HTC, it reminds me a bit the SDKs made by Google for Cardboard and Daydream.

What leaves me puzzled is some choices that Pico has made. For instance, the documentation is very good at giving you a quick start guide. But after you have made the first cube and built it, you have no idea how to go on, and you have to start studying the samples yourselves. The samples are listed in the Readme file of an empty repository in the GitHub account of Pico (why??). When you select one, you go to another repository (every sample has its own repo!) from where you can download the sample. The samples have been pushed on the repo with all their Library directories, something that every Unity developer knows it is bad practice. When I downloaded the sample for the front camera, the dev forgot actually to implement the script to access the camera in the sample scene (facepalm!), and I had to do it myself. Some names of variables are strange, like the one here below…

Good SDK, but weird choices 🙂

Price and availability

The Pico G2 “4K S” is already available for $375 on the official Pico website or through official resellers. The G2 “4K Enterprise” will be available in Q3 2020 for $450. The only difference between the two is that the “S” model doesn’t feature the front camera.

Final considerations

I am honest: the Pico G2 4K Enterprise is good, but I’ve not been excited by it. Some things of it are incredibly cool (the 4K display, the comfort, the new cleanable materials, etc…) but some others have disappointed me (the aberration in the optics, the fitting mechanism, etc…). Having tried the very good Neo 2, I expected something more.

And the reason is simple: while the Neo 2 is a new headset, this is just a refresh of an old device and it keeps all its previous problems. Most probably, if Pico had made a brand new G3, it would have better than this headset and it would have pleased me completely.

The best news of this device is that it proves that Pico is still committed to the 3DOF world and will keep supporting it at least for 2020 and 2021. All those people in the enterprise sector needing a device like this can be relieved to know that there is still a realiable vendor for this kind of solutions for the next two years.

Should you buy it?

Notwithstanding my critics, I think this is now the best standalone 3DOF headset you can find around: the Oculus Go is too old and limited (and it is just a consumer device), the Skyworth 4K has worse aberrations, and so on. So, if you need a 3DOF device for your company, this (or its companion “4K S”, depending on if you want the front camera or not) is the headset that you should buy now.

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