Chinese vendor Pico has just announced its latest headset, dubbed Pico 4 Ultra. In an event held today in China, the company has announced not only this device but also its enterprise version and a body tracker sensor. Ah and at a private event a few weeks ago, I’ve been able to go hands-on with the headset, so I can give you my quick first impressions about it…
Pico 4 Ultra
Pico has launched the Pico 4 Ultra, which is an MR refresh of the Pico 4, which was already an interesting headset if compared with Quest 2, but that suffered the comparison to the Quest 3, especially for the quality of Mixed Reality.
Specifications
- 2 * 2160 × 2160 Fast LCD Displays
- 90Hz Refresh rate
- 105° FOV
- 2 * RGB Passthrough cameras, for a total resolution of 32MP
- 1 Depth sensor
- 58-72mm IPD
- Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen2 chipset
- 12MB RAM
- 256GB Storage
- Wi-Fi 7 Connectivity
- USB-C Connectivity
- Bluetooth Connectivity
- 2 * Ringless controllers
- 580g Weight
Features
Apart from the plain specifications, there are some interesting features the company announced for the new headset:
- The headset is very balanced: the front and back weigh 304g and 276g respectively. The company says that the headset is designed to be used the whole day, but I highly doubt this claim, because no headset is ready for that, yet. Still, a balanced headset is much more comfortable to wear for long periods than a front-heavy one
- According to Pico, the screen has not only 62% more resolution than PICO’s previous model, but it also has gain color correction and an increase in screen brightness by 25%. The overall the visual quality should be much better. But be careful with these numbers because they are a bit misleading: the displays are probably the same as the Pico 4 (in fact the resolution of the screens is the same), but they are used in a better way. The notes on the website in fact report this: “The rendering resolution of PICO 4 Ultra is 1920 x 1920, over 62% higher than PICO 4”
- The controllers have been improved: they do not have the tracking ring and they are shorter and more comfortable than the previous ones. Their haptics are “powered by the Centaur multi-modal algorithm and HyperSense broadband linear motors”, which I don’t know what it means, but it sounded cool so I’m reporting it to you
- Passthrough is colored, undistorted, and in 8MP high quality. It also features MR image frame alignment. If you’re curious about why the passthrough has just 8MP when the cameras have 32MP, the footnotes on the Pico website, help us with calculations: “Image quality on PICO 4 Ultra is 8MP in color Seethrough mode. The image is an integration of the original images captured by the 32MP cameras. The actual screen resolution presented is lower than 8MP. This is because under Seethrough mode, the camera will leave a margin around the view to accommodate your head motion. Additionally, the camera features square imaging while Seethrough features circular imaging, which consequently involves image cropping. 20.6 PPD is calculated using the number of pixels on one side of the screen (FoV=105°, 2160/105≈20.57). A 72 Hz MR image frame alignment means that in MR mode, the frame rates of the screen and color passthrough cameras are consistent at 72 Hz. This gives you a smoother MR experience. This functionality will be available in a future OTA update“
- There is environment tracking, that enables “real-time mapping of the environment and objects”. What it does mean in detail is not clear to me, but I’m intrigued
- When not in mixed reality mode, you can immerse into a CG environment, as usual. In the live stream of the event, I also saw that there is an AI that can create such environments so that you can create a custom one according to your tastes
- The new Pico OS lets you put the 2D windows of the operating system all around you at 360°. It doesn’t seem that the OS has the ability to let you put windows everywhere like Quest in its latest update, but you can put windows in a circle all around you. Every window can be resized up to 280 inches. You can interact with these windows with your controller, hands, mouse, and keyboard. This is meant to let you use your Pico 4 Ultra headset also for productivity
- You can easily mirror your other devices to the Pico 4 Ultra: “You can mirror your Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android phone screens to PICO 4 Ultra. All via the PICO Connect app. Display up to 3 desktops or home screens simultaneously on your expansive ultrawide screen. All windows can be resized to suit your preferences”
- Pico 4 Ultra lets you record Spatial Videos (the one that the Vision Pro made popular) up to 2048 × 1536 pixels, 60 FPS, and 50 Mbps. After you have recorded these videos, you can edit them, apply filters to them, and upload them to TikTok all from the headset! It also lets you play back the videos you recorded on the Vision Pro
Content
Pico talked also about new content for its store during the launch event: it showed compatibility of the new headset with the mixed reality versions of Puzzling Places, Demeo, Spatial Ops, and Angry Birds VR. Five Nights At Freddie’s is also coming, together with the popular social space VRChat and Bulletstorm VR.
Thanks to partnerships also the content “Three Body” and “Outer-Space Interactive MR Exhibition” are to be launched in the future.
Enterprise version
Pico 4 Ultra also has a B2B variant called Pico 4 Ultra Enterprise. As usual, it is a variant that is similar to the original model, but it features a slightly different design (it’s all white), materials that facilitate the cleaning of the headset, a runtime that supports enterprise features, and dedicated assistance. More details on this headset are coming soon.
Hands-on impressions
I have been able to try the Pico 4 Ultra (I guess in its Enterprise variant) in a private Pico Business event. I can not write a review (or even a preview) about it because my time was limited and it was a pre-launch unit, but Pico people have been kind enough to let me share with you some quick hands-on impressions of the device.
The device looked very similar to the Pico 4 and I could distinguish it was different mainly because of the two front cameras. The comfort sensations I had when wearing the device were similar to Pico 4. There have been 4 things that I valued very positively compared to the previous model:
- The passthrough was damn good. Very good. Almost undistorted (even when moving a hand in front of my face) and with a high resolution. It looked depth-corrected. I valued it a bit below the Vision Pro one but without the motion blur that AVP has
- The hand tracking was also damn good. I thought it was the Ultraleap one, but then I was told is an internally developed algorithm
- The ringless controllers are nice and more ergonomic than before. Not having the huge ring is great
- The headset supported meshing of the environment: I could move and I could see it reconstructing the mesh of the space around me. That was pretty cool and made me dream about interesting MR applications that could be done with that. It’s not clear to me if the meshing was done in a special scene setup scene or could be possible in every application, though.
Sorry if I can’t say more than that or show any pictures. But I can say I came out with a good impression of it.
Price
The headset has been currently launched only in China. Pico 4 starts at 4299 Yuan (circa $600). Preorders in China start today, shipping is from September, 2nd. If you preorder the device, you get for free a couple of motion trackers. If you already have a Pico 4, you are also eligible for a discount.
If you are a Chinese company, you can instead buy the Pico 4 Ultra Enterprise for 7499 yuan (circa $1,050). The headset will be available starting from September, 3rd.
The availability of these headsets in the West has not been announced yet, but the devices should be launched here at a certain point because the Pico website features the page of the Pico 4 Ultra translated into all languages.
Final commentary
The Pico 4 Ultra seems to me an interesting refresh of the Pico 4. It keeps the design of the Pico 4, but it improves many specifications and also adds very high-quality mixed reality. I had personally very good impressions while trying it. The price seems in line with the one of the Quest 3 (if we include taxes), so it seems that Pico is back at releasing devices that can compete with Meta’s.
And this is the best news of the day, in my opinion. After a long silence, we all suspected that Pico may have gone out of business, while it’s still alive and kicking. It has launched a new headset and it is also adding new content to its store, showing that it is still interested in the consumer sector, at least in China. I have explicitly asked Pico for confirmation about their consumer interest, and a spokesperson replied that Pico is still committed to both the B2B and B2C markets. This is good, the more players we have in the space, the better is for all of us users.
Anyway, I still believe that in the West, Meta will still be ahead of Pico on the consumer side because it has a much richer store and a faster update of the runtime. But Pico has more control of the enterprise XR market than Meta.
Pico Motion Tracker
Together with the Pico 4 Ultra, Pico has also announced the Motion Tracker: a couple of tracking bracelets that you can wear to have your full body in virtual reality.
The tracker is very small, weighing only 27g. It can be fit to your ankles thanks to an elastic strap. It features an IMU sensor that works alongside 12 infrared sensors to give 6DoF tracking with a frequency of up to 200Hz. During the presentation, they claimed the tracking accuracy is <6° and <5cm.
Pico has an AI algorithm that can fuse the data of the headset, the controllers, and the two Motion Trackers on the ankles to reconstruct the full body of the user with 24 skeleton points. Regarding full body tracking, Pico claims a latency of 20ms and an accuracy of 98% for the detection of steps.
The setup of the full body tracking is also quite fast: Pico claims you just need 5 seconds. In the promotional video, they show that the only thing you have to do is look down at your feet while wearing the headset to be ready to play with your full body.
There are already more than 25 applications compatible with it on the Pico Store, including VRChat and Les Mills XR Dance.
Pico Motion Tracker is going to be sold in China for 399 Yuan (circa $56) for a pair. Preorders in China start today, shipping is from September, 2nd.
And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this news about the new products that Pico launched. If this is the case, please reshare it on your social media channels to help me a bit in spreading info to the XR community!
(Header image by Pico)