Pico Interactive’s next generation headsets—the Pico Neo 3 Pro and 3 Pro Eye—are now shipping to businesses worldwide, and they’re looking to undercut both Oculus and HTC by offering a pretty appealing set of specs at one of the lowest prices we’ve seen targeted at enterprise.

Update (October 1st, 2021): Pico launched Neo 3 Pro and Neo 3 Pro Eye, and it’s set to offer strong competition to Oculus Quest 2 Business Edition ($800) and HTC Vive Focus 3 ($1,300).

The new headsets, respectively priced at $700 and $900, include a battery strap similar to Oculus’ Elite Battery Strap for better comfort and longer battery life.

MRTV’s Sebastian Ang got to go hands-on with Pico Neo 3 Pro, and goes through a full unboxing and his impressions, which seem pretty favorable. If you’re short on time, jump to the 7-minute mark for Ang’s hands-on.

The original article announcing Neo 3 Pro and the Pro Eye variant follows below, including hardware specs.

Original Article (May 10th, 2021): Pico says these follow-up devices are “built for businesses and will be available in the West, including North America and Europe.” The company is also releasing them in China as well.

Pico says both Neo 3 Pro and Neo 3 Pro Eye will be available to enterprise sometime in Q3 2021, and they will be made available for pre-order on the Pico Neo website for $699 and $899 respectively. In China, its consumer Pico Neo 3 is coming in three flavors, priced locally at the US dollar equivalent of $390, $420, and $470.

As the name would suggest, its Neo 3 Pro Eye includes sensors for eye tracking; like in Neo 2 Eye, the eye tracking hardware is being provided by Tobii, the Sweden-based company known for integrating its tech into Vive Pro Eye, HP VR Reverb G2 Omnicept Edition, and more.

Image courtesy Pico Interactive

“Both 6DoF models were built for the enterprise and are powered by the Snapdragon XR2 Platform,” the company says in a press statement. “The headsets have a single 5.5 [inch] display with 3,664 × 1,920 resolution, a PPI of 773 and up to 90Hz refresh rate. With safety of utmost importance, the headsets also have a replaceable PU sterilizable face cushion that’s hygienic and washable.”

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Much like Facebook’s Quest hardware, both Neo 3 headsets include two optically-tracked motion controllers and four head-mounted camera sensors.

Image courtesy Pico Interactive

The Pico Neo 3 Pro and Neo 3 Pro Eye are also slated to tether to PCs via NVIDIA’s Direct Mode, which lets the DisplayPort supported headsets to provide native 4K@90Hz wired connection for Pico VR Streaming.

Pico says all of its Neo 3 headsets will also support NVIDIA CloudXR too, which lets you wirelessly stream VR content via 5G and WiFi networks.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • TechPassion

    Steam VR compatibility is what they need to reach mass market.

    • MeowMix

      2-3 years ago I would have agreed. But as a longtime VR user (since 2016), I’ll confidently say PCVR is still another 10 or more years before it’ll be considered mass market. Its unfortunate, but that’s just the way PCVR is.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      ‘Mass market’ in the west maybe, but not in China where they release these headsets also als consumer products.

      • TechPassion

        I was thinking about the version for EU and US. This Pico looks like a solid competitor to other vr headsets. What it needs is access to software. Sure, in China everything is censored and no access, right.

        • Andrew Jakobs

          Well, the Pico Neo 1 and 2 already support Wifi streaming SteamVR, so number 3 wouldn’t be any problem. But there probably is a reason why they won’t release the Pico Neo 3 consumer version in the west, what the reason is I don’t know, maybe because it won’t have a large store for native apps/games in the west, as that’s also a large part where they get their money from.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Outside of China they would have to compete with Facebook which are willing to sell the Quest almost at build cost and probably got favorable conditions for buying the XR2 in large quantities. Pico announced in March that they got another round of financing of about USD 37M, which is chump change for Facebook. They simply cannot compete in terms of development, marketing, support, paying for exclusives etc.

            And due to politics of the last few years there now exists a strong anti-China bias in the US, even for companies that go out of their way to proof that they are not siphoning data or leaking details to the government. So Pico couldn’t even build on the “not Facebook” bonus, because it would be countered by “but China” claims. See posts in this thread for multiple examples.

          • econik

            Wasn’t there some giant chinese company that was just found out to be sending data back to China just a few weeks ago? In China you can say we won’t send data back to China but if the government says to do it, they HAVE TO comply. Therefor it’s never safe to trust a chinese company. This isn’t difficult.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Just as it is never safe to trust an American company, which can also be forced to provide the government with data. Which is why both the “International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles” and the “EU-US Privacy Shield” agreement between the US government and the European commission were declared invalid by the European Court of Justice, as they fail to protect the personal information of European citizens.

            I’m not trying to equate the US and Chinese government regarding their trustworthiness, but I’d probably trust Pico more than Facebook, for the simple reason that Facebook has been caught red handed multiple times misusing data and lying about the impact, and their whole business model is based on it. They pulled all their VR devices from the German market to avoid getting in trouble when enforcing Facebook logins in their EULA, as they knew that the German data protection officers, well known for being very strict, would rip them a new one. That doesn’t bode well regarding their efforts to actually conform to (European) data protection laws.

          • econik

            American companies don’t have to share personal data. You can take a look at apple that denied the FBI access to data but allowed access to China. I agree though you can’t completely trust any company no matter which company it is or which country it is based in. However, I certainly would be much more hesitant and avoid a company based in an authoritarian country. To be clear FB is an enemy of the people and I don’t support them as a company.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            No. Apple refused to introduce special back doors that would enable them to retrieve encrypted information from a phone that they themselves cannot access. They have actually cooperated with the FBI by providing data that was stored in an unencrypted form on the Apple Cloud several times, as this doesn’t introduce a new security risk for other users, while a back door would.

            And the US government can force US companies to give them data stored on any of their servers, no matter where in the world these servers are located. Which was one of the main problems, as EU law usually prohibits US companies from giving out data if the data itself is stored on servers in the EU. The US government wasn’t willing to ensure that they wouldn’t force companies to provide them with private data of European citizens from European servers, which is why the European Court of Justice declared all the agreements as insufficient and therefore invalid.

            The US government can also prohibit US companies from admitting that they had to provide them with data, so basically companies are forced to lie about it on demand. Some companies try to work around this by giving a summarized number of how many government data request they received in the last years, as this is the max level they are allowed to report on, but never which data was request or for which users.

            This is not exactly unique, many countries have laws that give the government a lot of data access in the name of national security, which has become the catch-all phrase to circumvent privacy data laws, and they usually force companies to be silent about it. Which is one of the reasons why companies like Apple, WhatsApp or Telegram switched to end-to-end encryption, i.e. they themselves cannot read the data anymore, because the only way to ensure that the government cannot force them to turn over the data if they actually don’t have it. And this option to not have access to customer data themselves is what Apple (successfully) fought about with the FBI for years.

            There are actually a lot of legitimate reasons why we would want governments to access data without e.g. suspected drug cartels being notified about it. The difference is usually the level of abuse, as countries like China or Russia will pull a lot of data on political opponents with obviously made up claims of them endangering the social order or supporting terrorism, the other catch-all phrase to throw data privacy overboard. Western countries are less blatantly when ignoring these laws, but the US NSA basically invented large scale data mining of international data and had no problems to eavesdrop on allied governments, so any blind trust there is just being naive. Even within Europe e.g. the French secret service was caught at what was effectively providing industrial espionage services for the French high speed train industry.

            This is not a game where there are good guys/girls and bad guys/girls. This is a game of bad guys/girls and worse guys/girls.

  • mepy

    Interesting, but will there be enough software development for an open android VR platform in time to catch up with Oculus? Will Quest developers port their games and software to Pico Neo, Vive Focus 3 and eventually other android based headsets by other companies? Will there be a common standard? Oculus Quest is android based also, so developing for other android based VR platforms won’t be that hard, will it?

    Will open android VR become like Windows or Linux is in software availability and Oculus be with it’s restricted software access more as an Apple OS?

    The Chinese market is huge, so it would make sense for developers to translate and port their games and software. Also surely there will be lots of Chinese made software, will they translate that and will it work well? Will Vive software work on it?

    • Should be compatible with HTC’s Vive Wave open platform for standalone headsets (the previous Pico Neo headsets were), this is used by Vive Focus, etc.

      This immediately brings a larger standalone storefront to Pico devices and apps bought on both stores should run on the headset.

    • brandon9271

      Since the Quest 2 is basically a fancy mobile device… when are hackers going to make a “clean rom” that has android and Google Play store? lol

      • Andrew Jakobs

        And then what? wow you can use the clean rom for normal apps, but there is no VR app as there is no VR SDK for android as of yet.

        • Lhorkan

          With OpenXR, this is actually no longer the case.

      • mepy

        Or simply crack and hack the Oculus Quest 2 to install the Pico Neo or Vive Focus 3 OS.

        • brandon9271

          Anything to remove the stench of Suckerborg

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Will Quest developers port their games and software to Pico Neo, Vive Focus 3 and eventually other android based headsets by other companies? Will there be a common standard?

      The common standard is OpenXR, and VR developers usually use either the Unity or Unreal game engine, which puts an abstraction layer between the app, the OS and even the VR SDK, making many platform ports very easy. So if a developer got a Unity VR app for the Quest, might that developer be interested in creating another build for a platform with very similar technical specs that sells to a market covering almost 20% of the world’s population where the Quest isn’t available? Probably yes. Creating a Chinese language version might be a bigger challenge than porting the app itself.

    • Will Quest developers port their games and software to Pico Neo, Vive
      Focus 3 and eventually other android based headsets by other companies?

      We sure will port the Oculus Quest version of “Quest for Runia” to the Pico and the Focus once we get access to the hardware. We already support Chinese as a language among others, the SDKs are straight forward to integrate into Unity and Unreal.
      Too bad the Pico consumer version will not be available in western markets, though.

  • kontis

    See, Facebook?
    A standalone headset with XR2 chip AND DisplayPort video input for native PC support.

    China can do it, but USA can’t. We’ve got used to that fact in technology over the last decade…

    • MeowMix

      Yes ….. but Link (with the fancy encoding/decoding algorithms) inadvertently set the Quest on the path for Virtual Desktop streaming and then AirLink.

      I do agree a DP port would have been nice, but instead Link lead to lowcost, medium fidelity wireless PCVR.

      • kontis

        Yeah it’s great for going low cost, but we often say how China makes the cheap stuff and… ;)

        • econik

          If you were an underdog you would jump through hoops to gain a lead as well. Quest 2 releases earlier and your comparing something that is about to be released. Your logic is flawed to a great extent. I wouldn’t buy a fb headset for the same reasons i wouldnt buy a chinese headset. I don’t want to support authoritarians.

          • guest

            So you trust right wing authoritarians at FB more?

          • econik

            Can you not read? I said ***I wouldn’t buy a fb headset for the SAME reasons i wouldnt buy a chinese headset. I don’t want to support authoritarians.*** And to call FB right wing is absolutely fucking insane. It’s left wing with the rest of big tech. You are completely out of touch which is further shown by the fact you can’t comprehend what I said in my initial message.

          • Johnatan Blogins

            your views on left and right are a bit off…

          • To think that Facebook is not right wing is absolutely insane. You are probably in the US and haven’t heard much from the rest of the world or what leftists movement were about. You probably have been brained washed to think so far right that you see the center right as left wing. The left was born in a movement, a movement that called for giving workers ownership of their labor. What you call “left” is actually “liberal” which wants to keep a wealthy CEO owning and running the entire company as he pleases for as long as he pleases like Mark does. While the actual left is about giving the final say about what a corporation does to the employees, the total opposite.

    • The irony is the same / similar tier factories are building all this stuff in China for Oculus, Valve, etc….

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Mind you, that’s only on the Pro versions, not the regular consumer versions.

      • VRFriend

        We paid 800 EUR for HP Reverb G2.

        • Andrew Jakobs

          what has that got to do with Displayport on the Pico Neo 3 pro?

    • evestraw

      Face book could do it but choose not to because it’s more profitable to force people into your own store

    • But communism, remember that.

      • econik

        Yea the communist part of China developed a VR set not the capitalist part. And obviously the US could do it and even facebook, however, they don’t want to. How can anyone be so dense?

    • ViRGiN

      See Facebook? What a valve fanboy lol. Where is steamvr with mobile vr?

      • Lhorkan
        • ViRGiN

          Apparently not. It’s a wet dream with no software for Facebook haters who hated mobile vr for years, but once valve does it, they don’t mind mobile phone graphics

      • Pie

        Sometimes I read your comments and wonder if you’re aware of how indoctrinated into FB’s ecosystem you seem?

        Most of the people making the criticisms you diligently defend against don’t actually state what their preference is? (Many comments you make on uploadVR follow the same pattern).

        It leads to the perception of you as some kind of Cult member.

        (I only have a Quest 2… Go ahead and call me a fanboy)

        • ViRGiN

          There isn’t anything really outside of Vive/Index, and WMR is completly irrelevant outside simulators crowd.

          There is nothing fanboying about Q2, cause it’s really solid device with solid library, and only fb haters can disagree with it.

          Mind you, i have Facebook account but don’t use it for any social purposes. I never got asked to upload one selfie a day to my Facebook to remain active.

      • Carnel

        mobile VR will never be as good as PCVR, get used to it.

        • ViRGiN

          It will always be more relevant, get over it.
          PCVR is in horrible state, there are only a handful relevant games that are worthy PCVR title. The most popular ones, as seen on VRLFG, have nothing common with PCVR and that’s where everyone is spending time.

          Even Nintendo switch has better games, and it’s mobile. Get over it.

          • Carnel

            lol, a lot of the popular quest games are just downgraded PCVR games, what are you on about?

          • ViRGiN

            Exactly why it’s so good. PCVR is infinitely subpar to even 2010 games, yet here you are acting like PCVR is the highest end.

            Ask the developers where it makes to develop for. PCVR people after investing heavy money aren’t buying games.
            Get OVER it. Tell me what games valve funded since 2016?

          • Carnel

            pretty telling that Valve doesn’t need to pay devs to get games like Boneworks on SteamVR.

          • ViRGiN

            Oh so you’re against sponsorships and paying devs upfront?
            I guess that’s why 95% steamvr releases are random bullshit.

            I bet you’ve said Facebook is ruining vr with it’s exclusives at some point in your life haha.

            And let me guess, your list of games done well begins with boneworks and ends with alyx, and you’ll say the same shit 5 years from now.

          • Carnel

            for your information, I own a quest and I still have no real interest in the games when I can get better overall quality on my PC, it’s only good as a PC headset.

          • ViRGiN

            For your information, boneworks is also on the Oculus store.
            That still doesn’t change a fact that PCVR is a dead platform.

            Enjoy your superiority.

          • Carnel

            Yeah, it’s called having a choice but you’re probably not used to that since you can only rely on what facebook gives you.

          • ViRGiN

            And your choice is continuing to support monopoly and using one store, because that’s where all your games are.

  • So no reason to pick this over a Quest 2 that I can see then. I’ll wait until Quest 3 to see if that does anything more exciting than the rest of the competition seems to be offering just now….

  • xyzs

    Hard to be a more obvious copy of Quest 2…
    Reminds me when all Smartphones copied the horrible iPhone notch.
    Oculus seems to be the Apple of VR now.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Well, it’s more like they just used the reference model provided by Qualcomm which came out long before anything was known about the Quest 2. And it wasn’t Apple that had the first notch, it’s actually Apple that copied it from others.

  • Adrian Meredith

    Those apps are built on the Oculus sdk

  • MeowMix

    From what was reported by UploadVR, Pico is a subsidiary of Goertek.
    So why does this matter ? Goertek is the preferred manufacturer of choice of Facebook. Goertek manufactures the Quest2 (and previously did the Quest1 and Rift CV1).

    If that’s the case, then this is essentially a Quest2 clone, and in no way will Goerktek step on Facebook’s toes in the market. Thus, don’t expect Pico to supply this to the western markets in any significant manner. They won’t want to piss off FB

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  • I’m interested in the Chinese version: with that price and that content, it can start-up the Chinese VR consumer market

    • econik

      Yea, I’m sure Xi would love that.

  • Very nice, but it’s not for consumers so we still can’t really call it a quest 2 competitor

  • ViRGiN

    Watch how nobody buys it, after months of claims that they would purchase equivalent of q2 for up to 3x the price