It always helps to have a bit of competition.
The new Pico 4 Ultra has been announced.
https://www.picoxr.com/global/products/pico4-ultra
Some features:
- 4 tracking cameras (with Quest 2 style placement, which will give better overhead tracking than Quest 3)
- 2 colour cameras for passthrough, each 32MP (Quest 3 has 4MP cameras). Passthrough quality is 8MP.
- Time of flight IR depth sensor
- WIFI 7 with 5ms latency
- AV1 video stream compression from PC with 2ms decode latency
- 2048 × 1536 spatial video recording at 60fps
- Hardware MV-HEVC decoding, so it can directly play VIsion Pro spatial videos
- Add-on body trackers with 6DOF tracking at 200Hz. Looks like mainly intended for feet tracking, but the tracker can detach from the straps and attach to other devices like rackets)
- Same CPU as Quest 3: Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2
- 12GB ram (Quest 3 is 8GB)
- 2160x2160 per eye at 90Hz (Quest 3 is 2064x2208). 1920x1920 rendering resolution.
- Panoscreen lets you place virtual monitors in 360 degrees around you.
- Pico Connect lets you mirror up to 3 device screens (mac, windows, ios or android) into the headset at once.
I don't see anything on availability outside of China yet, which is usually the downside to Pico headsets.
Hopefully they've continued their tradition of not requiring a phone to set up the headset. That's the thing about Meta headsets I dislike the most, there's no reason a phone is needed for setup when the headset runs android already!
Overall looks pretty interesting. Reviews should be interesting.
