spatialcomputing.info

Pico Interactive announced last week that Neo 3, the Beijing-based company’s next standalone VR headset, is slated to arrive to consumers in Asia starting May 10th, 2021, and to enterprise in the West sometime this summer. We had only seen a single partial rendering of Pico Neo 3, however now the company has revealed more of the headset alongside revealing a few basic specs.

Update (April 13th, 2021): Pico today released more info on its upcoming Neo 3 standalone. There’s only a short spec sheet for now. Today’s news also came with a new image of the headset, which we’ve included above.

Pico Neo 3 will include:

• Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chipset
• WiFi 6 antenna 
• optical controllers with embedded tracking sensors
• three physical IPD adjustments
• four wide-angle cameras providing “millimeter-level” positioning and tracking
• curved screen clocked at 90Hz refresh

Notably, the Snapdragon XR2 is the same chipset inside Oculus Quest 2. The company says its enterprise version for outside of Asia is slated to release sometime in summer 2021. The original article follows below:

Original Article (April 7th, 2021):The company released the news via its official Weibo account early yesterday, stating that the headset will be launched at a special event taking place on May 10th at the Beijing National Aquatics Center, also known as ‘Water Cube’.

As reported by Chinese VR publication Yivian, the headset appears to have four optical sensors and a new Oculus Touch-like controller.

There’s essentially nothing else to go on besides the rendering above, however Pico is making definite strides to appeal to consumers in Asia with the launch of its next standalone headset.

In late March, the company announced its was opening its own publishing division, called Pico Studios. The company says it will be partnering with global developers to bring its 6DOF VR apps and games to consumers in Asia. The company has already stocked its Pico Store with around 400 apps, which include a number of fan favorites localized for Chinese consumption such as Superhot VR, Apex Construct, Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs, and Racket: Nx.

As for the West, Pico is still focusing on serving enterprise clients and B2B with Neo 3, which makes sense since there are very few companies up to the task of undercutting the successful Oculus Quest platform vis-à-vis Facebook.

It’s important to note that China-based consumers can’t purchase Oculus devices as Facebook is banned in that country, which makes for an interesting state of affairs. Pico Interactive has been armed with a fresh B and B+ funding round though, amounting to around $67M, so there’s no telling what inroads Pico will make outside of Asia in the future.