Today, or better tonight in my time zone, Pico had a special developer event where it teased its new operating system and its new upcoming headset, codenamed Project Swan. All the info shared makes us think about a headset in the same category as the Apple Vision Pro. Let me tell you everything we now know about it.
The PICO Developer Special Event
PICO held this Developer Special Event on YouTube, with a video that was not a livestream, but a prerecorded video with a Premiere launch time. The time was weirdly 3 am Central European time: I found it weird because currently Pico has a strong presence in China and in Europe, so I don’t know why it chose a time that is comfortable for China and the US.
Anyway, I woke up at 3 am, thinking that this could be the moment Pico was announcing its new headset. I couldn’t be more wrong. During the video, Pico teased some features of the upcoming operating System, Pico OS 6, and of the new headset, codenamed Project Swan… but there was no official reveal. The stream lasted only 15 minutes and left us wanting more. A guy on the livechat commented with “this video could have been an email”, and I pretty much agree with him.
Anyway, after having gotten back to sleep, I woke up thinking that the info shared was still quite interesting to understand what Pico is doing, so I’m going to share it with you. This way, the video can actually be a blog post (not an e-mail, but close) and you can get what is happening without having had the need of waking up early during the night.
Pico OS 6
Pico spent the last two years building its next major version of the OS for its XR headsets: Pico OS 6.
Pico built this OS on three principles:
- Efficiency
- Intuition
- Openness
Let’s see what it means
Pico OS 6 – Efficiency
Pico aims at creating an iOS where multitasking can be a thing, where in the same home space, you can have both 2D and 3D apps working at the same time.
This is exactly how the Vision Pro already works, and Pico aims at emulating this. In fact, exactly like Apple talks about Spatial Computing, Pico has called the Engine that makes all of this possible the Pico Spatial Engine. This is a new engine in the OS that moves all the rendering burden to the OS, and not on the app anymore. With Pico Spatial Engine, you can, for instance, play a tabletop 3D game with your friends while the browser window is open.
Pico OS 6 – Intuition
Pico wants its operating system to be as intuitive as possible. That’s why it allows for multiple interaction modes:
- Gaze and pinch
- Controllers
- Full body tracking via Pico Trackers
- Mouse+Keyboard (for productivity)
This looks very similar to what Apple is doing with Vision Pro, with the difference that Pico has been working with the Pico Controllers since day 1.
Pico is introducing a new design language with its OS, called Cloud Crystal, meant to make UI elements fit better with a real background. It is strikingly similar to the one Apple has with the Vision Pro.
The UIs of Pico 6 are meant to have very readable text. They also adapt to the lighting of the real environment around you.
Pico OS 6 – Openness
Pico OS 6 should support various kinds of apps:
- Spatial Apps
- Android Apps
- Web Apps
It is also compatible with experiences built with different technologies:
- WebXR
- PCVR (I guess via streaming)
- OpenXR
Apps built for previous Pico headsets will still work on the new headset.
Developer tools
Pico introduced new ways for developers to build apps for its headsets:
- Game Engines: people who were used to developing XR apps using Unity or Unreal Engine can still do that. Pico is introducing new tools to let you create apps that work as spatial widgets in multitasking with other apps. This is similar to what happens on the Vision Pro, where in Unity you can choose if building an app that takes the whole control of the headset, or a 3D widget that coexists with the other apps
- Pico Spatial UI + SDK: Pico SDK is meant for native Android developers to create spatial apps for the new OS using the tools they already know, like Kotlin. Pico Spatial UI are facilities to create 2D apps that have the same style as the system menus. In this case, the Pico Spatial Engine takes care of all the XR and input management, the light adjustment, etc… and the app can just behave like a standard app. Developers can create a spatial app without needing to know how to build specifically for an XR headset. Pico Spatial Plugin and Pico Spatial Editor help you in building all the apps inside Android Studio
- WebSpatial: it lets you build spatial apps using the tools web developers already know, like HTML5, CSS, and React. It is cool that WebSpatial is open source and cross-platform, so it is not only meant for Pico headsets. In fact, my friend David Gene Oh was already promoting its use to create spatial apps for the Apple Vision Pro
- Existing Android apps work inside Pico OS 6 out of the box
Pico also detailed the spatial capabilities of OS 6: the Pico Spatial Engine can perform environment understanding, semantic understanding, spatial meshing, persistent anchors, and plane detection. To be honest, a good part of these features were already present in the previous version of the OS
All the announced tools are already available today, and can already be tested with an emulator of the headsets. You can head to developer.picoxr.com to find them.
Project Swan
In the video, Pico gave a sneak peek at its next flagship device, the company has been working on for three years: Project Swan. They didn’t officially launch the device, but anticipated three things about it.
The first is clarity: Pico understands that to use a headset for productivity, text should be clearly readable. To achieve this, it has customized a display chip to achieve an average of 40 PPD and a peak of 45 PPD at the center of the vision. For comparison, previous-gen headsets were below 20 PPD. Pico talked about two 4K displays with “unparalleled quality”.
The second is mixed reality: Pico built its own custom chips to meet the high demands of a good mixed reality experience: it fuses multiple data to guarantee a passthrough with low latency, high-quality environment understanding, and good eyes and hands tracking. Thanks to this, the whole latency of MR is below 12 ms.
But one chip is not enough to drive the entire system, so Pico is using a double-chip design, again like the Vision Pro. One SoC chip is meant to power the applications, while the other, the Pico Silicon, is meant to take all the burden of the various tracking features. This way the applications are free to use the whole power of the SoC chip.
The “Flagship SoC” chip is a new chip that has double the CPU and GPU capabilities of the current Snapdragon XR2 Gen2, so we can expect that it is probably a new still-announced flagship chipset by Qualcomm (XR2 Gen3? XR2 Gen 3+?). It’s good to see so much power in a mixed reality headset, even if I doubt that this will be as powerful as the M5 currently installed on the Vision Pro.
The third important info shared with us is that this headset is coming out this year. For people who want to get their hands on this device early, Pico is offering a “Global Early Access Program”. Pico wants experienced teams to get their hands on it, to give the company feedback before the launch of the headset. Interesting teams can head to the Pico website to register for it.
General impressions
I’m honestly not much surprised by this announcement. Rumors around a Vision Pro clone being built by Pico were strong, and the company has teased exactly that. For years, Pico has taken a lot of inspiration from Meta headsets, and now has pivoted to copy Apple headsets. Almost everything, from the design of the UI, the compatibility with 2D apps, to even the dual-chip design, has been taken from Apple’s flagship XR headset.
So this headset is not very original. But Pico has always delivered solid devices, so I’m pretty sure this will be a solid Android clone of the Vision Pro. And given its expertise in B2B, I’m also pretty sure this will be a fantastic “spatial computing” headset for enterprise settings. The teased super-powerful chips, together with the very crisp resolution, are going to be super useful in companies working on design and prototyping, for instance. The only big unknown is the price: this headset can’t be cheap, and it will be interesting to learn how it compares with Apple Vision Pro, Play For Dream, Galaxy XR, and Vivo Vision in terms of price.
On the consumer side, I don’t see this as a headset that is going to change anything. It will be too expensive to move the needle, exactly like the Vision Pro. Some prosumers are going to buy it, for sure, but this is not a headset made for gaming.
Anyway, I’m intrigued to learn more about this device, and I hope the company will share more info at GDC later this month.
(Header image by Pico)