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After months of rumors and leaks, ByteDance-run XR brand Pico has finally unveiled its latest VR headsets, including the high-end Pico 4 Pro.
From Project Cambria to the Oculus Quest 2 from the base Pico 4, the Pico 4 Pro model promises to bring developers, businesses and mainstream users a premium VR experience that beyond anything Pico currently offers (opens in new tab).
According to Pico, the Pico 4 Pro VR headset (which is very similar to the Pico 4) will deliver on its high-end experience promise by using improved specs compared to the base model. Chief among these improvements are the three infrared cameras in the headset that can track your eye movements.
Just as we’ve seen from our experience using the PlayStation VR 2 to play Horizon Call of the Mountain, eye tracking can help make VR experiences that much more immersive – because NPCs can react to what you’re looking at and even be able to make eye contact with you.
Developers making games for the Pico 4 and PlayStation VR 2 (as well as Project Cambria, which Meta says will also use eye-tracking) can also use eye-tracking to enable foveated rendering, which should allow for more impressive games without the need for that. more powerful is needed. (and heavier) hardware.
As the developers of Moss: Book 2 explained to us, this works by reducing the processing power used by parts of the world the player isn’t looking at – either blurring it out or not displaying it at all – and concentrating on the areas that watching players. If done right, the player won’t notice anything at all, except that the world is much more detailed and expansive than traditional VR games.
Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait a little longer before we get our hands on the Pico 4 Pro (assuming it even launches in the UK, US and Australia after the base model rejected the latter two).
Pico’s announcement in September was mainly focused on the base Pico 4, with only a few sentences devoted to the upgraded model. We weren’t even given a price or release date for the Pro. Instead, Pico tells us to tune in to the AWE Lisbon presentation in October – with the event on October 20 and 21.
With Project Cambria (allegedly called the Meta Quest Pro) unveiled at Meta Connect 2022 in early October, it’s going to be a busy month for VR. By the end of 2023, our list of the best VR headsets could look very different.