Pico is releasing Pico 4 Ultra starting this month, where it’s slated to take on Quest 3 across Europe and Asia—which could be right in time for Meta to unveil the allegedly cheaper Quest 3S.

Pico is releasing pre-orders for Pico 4 Ultra in Europe from September 6th to September 19th, priced at £529 / €599, looking to take on Quest 3 as it hones in on a similar specs sheet and price point.

Like with its predecessor Pico 4, which released in 2022, supported regions across Europe include Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, UK, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

Image courtesy Pcio Interactive

If you’re in any of those regions, you’ll be able to pre-order through online retailers Amazon, MediaMarkt, Elkjop, Argos, Very, Currys, Coolblue, XR Shop, Bestware, Digitech, Galaxus and Otto.

General sales will begin on September 20th, which will also include in-store availability at both MediaMarkt and Elkjop.

Here’s a quick look at Pico 4 Ultra’s specs:

  • Processor: Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2
  • RAM & Storage: 12 GB RAM + 256 GB Storage – LPDDR5 + UFS 3.1
  • Wireless Connectivity: Supports Wi-Fi 7 (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be), Bluetooth 5.3
  • Mixed Reality Sensor: 32 MP color passthrough camera ×2, iToF depth-sensing camera ×1, Environment tracking camera ×4
  • Display: 2.56-inch screens at 2,160 × 2,160 pixels (×2), 1200 PPI (pixels per inch)
  • Rendering resolution: 1920 × 1920 (×2)
  • Refresh rate: 90 Hz
  • Optics: Pancake lenses at 105° FOV, 20.6 PPD (pixels per degree)
  • IPD Adjustment: 58 mm–72 mm
  • Audio: dual stereo speakers, 4 microphones and supports spatial audio recording
  • Battery: 5,700 mAh rated capacity, 5,774 mAh typical capacity
  • Charging: supports QC 4.0 / PD 3.0, 45W fast charger
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To further entice those of you on the fence, pre-order customers will also receive a free set of Pico Motion Trackers as well as four games: Blade & Sorcery Nomad, Infinite Inside, Let’s Get Fit VR, and FootPool.

The Motion Trackers, which combines IMU tracking with 12 infrared sensors for 6DOF tracking, are normally priced at £79 / €89.

Image courtesy Pico Interactive

The headset is also releasing across Asia, including China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. However a US launch doesn’t seem to be in the cards for now (or ever), likely due to parent company ByteDance’s legal issues in that country regarding the video streaming platform TikTok.

Meanwhile, Meta is likely getting ready to release its rumored Quest 3S, which could make that price gap even bigger and more difficult to justify, as Quest 3S is reportedly slated to replace Quest 2 as the company’s more affordable headset.

If Meta’s recent FCC certification is anything to go by, it’s likely we’ll learn more at Meta Connect 2024, which takes place precisely one week after Pico stops pre-orders and opens up general availability of Pico 4 Ultra.

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Scott Hayden
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 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • ViRGiN

    It will face fierce competition from 1895 days old Volvo Yandex.
    Not even Meta haters are buying Pico.

  • I saw yesterday a Pico 4 Ultra on sale in a shop in Shenzhen!

    • XRC

      How is life in Shenzhen? 旅途愉快

  • Andrew Jakobs

    I might just do a pre-order, due to it also having the free motion trackers, but it's still a big shame Pico hasn't upgraded/fixed the lenses.

    • Shad Apkant

      No true competition means no true innovation. QED.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Well they have competition from Meta, HTC, panasonic and Pimax, and some other individual small companies.

        • Shad Daffucup

          And which of those can sell at scale inside of mainland China?

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Meta partnered with Tencent, if they get their act together. They partnered with Xiaomi on Oculus Go, and Tencent makes enough money to compete with ByteDance/Pico on their home turf.

            Meta is looking for such partnerships or others releasing Horizon OS HMDs, as they needs to seriously grow the user base before AndroidXR gains traction. Last month a future low cost Horizon HMD from Indian telecom Reliance Jio was reported. Meta holds 10% of Jio, the CEOs are personal friends, and even though Jio's "only" generates 10% of Meta's revenue, this would bring Horizon OS to a market larger than China. I'd expect more such deals once the low cost Quest 3S is revealed.

            Meta aims for more competition, but in a "winner takes it all" platform dominance game, it's not easy to convince larger partners to play along. Meta won't accept Google's "we get 30% of ALL software sales" for PlayStore access, and Tencent probably backed out of the 2023 deal due to similar demands from Meta for Horizon OS. It's not that they couldn't sell at scale inside of China, the issue is more that only small partners like Asus or Jio are willing to relinquish all control.

  • Arno van Wingerde

    Although it does have a few hardware advantages over the Quest3 at a similar pricepoint, such as a decent strap, some extra memory and some marginally improved specs, the difference is nowhere as large as between Quest2 and Pico4. Overall, I fail to see why I would give up on a number of strong games to get this thing. The policy at Pico to fire a large part of their software group does not inspire confidence either and as for Meta haters: sure I can relate to that, but switching to a Chinese company with strong ties to its government does not seem much of an improvement to me…

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      It's less about user choice, as distribution zones limit competition between Meta and Pico. About 580M people can buy either a Pico or a Quest, while 450M can only get Quest and 1470M only Pico. Actual distribution is even more skewed, with est. 80% of all Quest sold in the US, and Pico selling mostly in China. Most VR users can't choose, and most of the world can't get either.

      I have a Quest 3 and could get a Pico 4 Ultra. I'm very interested in non-gaming VR, and for this like the extra RAM and improved balance/comfort from the halo strap. Camera supported leg trackers are nice, but I'd rather have them bring over eye tracking from the Pico 4 Enterprise/China-only USD ~600 Pico 4 "game/play edition".

      I'll probably skip the Ultra, but right now it barely matters. We are only at the beginning of an XR HMD shift from mostly gaming to "other things too", a bet on the future by some XR companies, with few HMDs available. Ultra improves the Pico 4 esp. for this use case with XR2 Gen 2 (faster than in Quest 3), improved passthrough, more RAM and added depth sensor, bringing hardware parity with Meta.

      Ultra currently wins for developers exploring XR productivity, but for (standalone) gamers or devs needing to make money, Quest 3 is hard to beat. Your existing library will count more than hardware. And for most the choice is made by where they live. Things could get way more interesting with Quest 4/Pico 5, if Pico expands to the US and Meta to China (via Tencent), and more development shows whether XR productivity gains traction.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        You can just buy a Pico 4 Pro (it's the eyetracking version) from aliexpress, and they'll ship to many countries.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          I wasn't aware of this, though these seem to be gray exports. I was also hoping for eye tracking on Ultra for specific reasons. For one the improved hardware makes it more suitable for productivity apps, and the faster SoC should allow for more useful ETFR than on the XR2(+) Gen 1 Quest Pro/Pico 4 Pro.

          The second reason is different feature sets on Pico 4 Enterprise compared to Pico 4 game/play edition, now called Pro. Enterprise allowed access to the camera feed, but you couldn't use any apps from the Pico store, while game/play/Pro gives you all the apps, but no sensor access for privacy reasons. AFAIK they use different Pico OS versions, with no way to enable the missing features.

          With Ultra mostly being improved for XR productivity, I hoped they'd include eye tracking for new forms of interaction, and also allow both store and camera access. XR productivity is currently about using existing apps in parallel, while new AR features need camera access, and Apple and Meta already moved towards this. So it would have made sense on the Ultra as a partial hardware refresh to keep up with Quest 3, a transition device until their AVP competitor is ready. Adding all this would have been cheap, so IMHO they missed an opportunity here to draw in lots of devs wanting to experiment with XR productivity.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            Doesn't current sdk give access to the camera? How do MR developers do their games? Or what kind of access do you need to the camera.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Currently it's more like a green screen. Developers define which part of the display the OS will replace with passthrough, but can't access the camera image itself. Which apps would need to read a QR code, recognize an object or translate text like Google Lens.

            Right now apps are technically blind and only see the world through a 3D representation created by Horizon OS. That's enough to allow users to navigate, place a virtual tabletop game on a real desk represented as a flat surface, or hang a virtual picture or aquarium to the wall. This also prevents apps from spying on users, but won't allow for anything that needs more than a boxy representation of you environment.

            Initially XR meant VR as separate worlds, mostly for immersive games and simulations, or AR interacting with and adding to our real world. AR has a lot more practical applications, but is way more complicated and compute expensive, so the Meta-Ray Ban AR smart glasses still send pictures to remote data centers for analysis. MR was mostly a marketing term for passthrough to hide that HMDs couldn't do AR yet, but we are now getting there, so technical and privacy issues need to be resolved.

  • tooque

    The Pico 4 was an easy upgrade over Quest 2 for me, and I used the heck out of it at the time.
    If I didn't already have a Quest 3 now, I would definitely grab it. But it is not anywhere near as compelling an upgrade that Pico 4 was. If it had eye tracking, that would have pushed me to buy it.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Yeah it's a shame they left that out, even though the Pico 4 Pro isn't much more expensive, but ofcourse lacks the new enhancements of the Ultra. The Ultra enterprise edition doesn't have eyetracking, according to the information available.

  • Mam Mem

    As Quest 3 and Pico 4 Ultra owner among others i have to say that Pico 4 Ultra felt like a step upwards from Quest 3. Better image (colors, brightness, binocular overlap) and way more comfortable. It feels more natural. Compared to Pico 4 the image is sharper, especially in standalone apps (far higher render resolution), no Mura (Pico 4 have some) and lesser glare. It has NOT the same lenses and displays. Ultra's lenses and displays are selected. Of course MR and passthrough, also the UI was bettered and more home environments. Maybe spacial video capture is a nice feature. But the highlight are the motion trackers. Hope that many apps will support it (Les Mills Bodycombat). And the Pico 4 was NOT the competitor to Quest 2. It was the competitor to Quest Pro! It was no comparision between the ancient Quest 2 and the nextgen Pico 4. So the Pico 4 Ultra is also not the competitor to Quest lite. It has the same level as Quest 3, or slightly higher.