A Night with Pico 4 Pro

A.K.A. What the other Pico users won't tell you

A Night with What Now?

The Pico 4 Pro is a Chinese-designed standalone VR headset made by Pico VR (duh) which is the VR Division/Arm of ByteDance, the company behind TikTok. It aims to be a competitor to the Quest Pro, featuring pancake optics, higher resolution LCD panels, and perhaps most importantly - a much lower price. On paper it's actually pretty impressive:

The Pico 4 Pro was not officially released in America but you can get the Chinese version through Newegg for about $600. This means the price sits just a tad higher than the Quest 3, and well below the Quest Pro, but with a vast majority of the features of the Pro. A very attractive offer, really. At any rate let's get to my actual thoughts.

What's Great

The first impressions

The Pico comes well-packaged and certainly feels nice. The hardware seems pretty well thought out and very clearly inspired by the Quest headsets. It's pretty compact, a bit smaller than the Quest 2 and has a vented fan from the bottom to the top to keep the SoC cool. The built-in battery is on the back of the head strap for better balance, and the right headstrap arm holds little volume buttons so you don't accidentally poke them when adjusting the unit.

The displays

Visuals in the headset are pretty sharp, as is to be expected at this resolution. The panels get suitably bright and blacks are the usual hazy that you get from any other LCD panel headset: noticeable at first but tends to fade away as you get used to them and more immersed in content. Not even a lick of screen-door can be seen here. The pancake lenses... well they didn't really impress me that much. I'd say if you've never used a pancake-lens headset before the benefits are very apparently more in the size department than in any sort of optical clarity. The sweet spot is larger compared to the Index and edge-to-edge clarity is pretty good, but when things are dialed in it's no more or less clear than the fresnels in the Index that I can see. Glare is also still very much present, it's just not the streaky glare like you get with fresnel lenses. It's sort of a haze or almost a lens-flare sort of glare. This, too, is not really much better than Index, I might even go so far as to say the Quest 2 has less glare.

The little touches

Motorized IPD is very neat to have, especially at this price point. The headset walks you through looking at some moving dots and just sets it for you. While I noticed about a 0.5mm variance between different runs, it seems to be pretty accurate, as manually setting it much lower or higher than what it measured did seem a little less comfortable. Perhaps this is just a Chinese thing but the headset is also very not-locked-down. Sideloading content Just Werks™ and some items that are properly configured even just appear in the app library instead of the separate "unknown sources" category. No need to create a stinky developer account to get your neat sidequest games. The controllers are also quite nice. They have capacitive buttons, analog stick, and triggers like the Oculus controllers, and while they look weird, the tracking rings are actually very cleverly designed. They don't get in the way in any pose, and because they curve out to either side, the headset can see them more easily when you are e.g. holding a rifle in a shooting game.

What Ain't

The built in audio

My Quest 2 impressed me pretty well when I played some Beat Saber on it. Audio was surprisingly good for two tiny little holes in the head strap arms. The Pico 4 Pro leaves a lot to be desired by comparison. Perhaps it's just because the speakers in the head strap fire backwards instead of inwards, it's hard to test, but it doesn't have anywhere near the range of sound that the Quest 2 does. The Chorus I Frankensteined onto mine in the picture above is practically a necessity if you want to do any real listening on it (The Chorus is pretty great by the way, highly recommend it now that it's cheaper).

The lenses

Now maybe this is just the nature of pancake optics or maybe I have a dud, and it's kind of not that impactful in actual use, but there were two issues I noticed with the optics in the Pico 4 Pro. One is that edge-to-edge clarity does not seem to match between the lenses. Specifically the right lens at the bottom looks noticeably blurrier than the left. It's not a HUGE difference, but it is something you can see, and it was there in any sort of position I was able to get the headset to sit on on my head. The other thing I noticed you really have to look for, and that's that the lens geometry is such that it causes a very subtle distortion across your view. I only noticed it when looking at a flat wall with some straight trim or lines through the center, but the view is not perfect, it wavers ever so slightly across the lens surface. Again, this could just be how pancake lenses work, but it's not something I ever noticed in my Quest 2 or Index.

The software

This is really more of a nitpick than anything but the Pico software, while it works, just doesn't feel all that polished. Probably the most annoying aspect from my use case (that is, as a SteamVR headset with mixed tracking) is that when you take the headset off for a while it wants you to re-confirm your boundary, and that would be fine, but unlike the Quest 2 where with your controllers off you can just use the hand-tracking to poke the button to accept, the Pico's hand-tracking does not work on this screen, so you have to grab a Pico controller, turn it on, press the button, and then turn it off again. Very frustrating. The other thing I didn't really care about, but is worth noting: Software selection on Pico is not spectacular. Now granted, I also refuse to make a Pico account (in fact, I've blocked the headset from accessing the internet at all) because (((China))), so I can't peruse the store, but from what I can see while the Pico has some decent titles, there's a lot it doesn't have compared to the Quest, even on Sidequest or Itch. Overall, if you actually want to use your headset standalone, just get a Quest. The software selection is more than worth the tradeoff there.

What really ruins it

The non-native experience a.k.a. "Death by A Thousand Cuts"

This. This is where it all breaks down. I am so beyond spoiled by my setup being all-native SteamVR it's not even funny. The ease of use Valve has created for its users is just frankly really spectacular. Turn on VR Mode, all your base stations fire up, throw the headset on, grab your controllers and off you go. It all is just so seamless and convenient. The crazy thing is I used a mixed environment before when I had a Samsung Odyssey+, so I knew what I was getting into more or less, but what's really damning here is that in the 3-4 years since then literally nothing has improved. I feel like I should blame the Quest for this. We had so much time during COVID where everyone was on VR for clever people to come up with great solutions that would have made mixed PC VR more convenient, but thanks to standalone headsets everyone just grabbed the native Quest version of everything and didn't have to bother. Space Calibrator is virtually identical to how it was in 2018, save for the single addition of continuous calibration, and while that's nice and all, it still has times where it goes wonky and you're staring at your own mangled body for a few seconds until it un-fucks itself. Add to that that I have to start and stop the base stations myself with Lighthouse Manager (and that that sometimes fails) and also that I have to deal with network latency and interference (and increased CPU load from video compression to stream) which on top of the noticeable (if subtle) delay also introduces color banding and occasional hitching, especially in busy lobbies... It all just starts to feel like too much compromise for something that for the longest time for me just fucking worked. As a cherry on top, with all the shit on the Pico to make it more bearable (the Logitech Chorus, the Tundra Tracker, and the BoboVR Twin Battery setup), it ends up being heavier and less comfortable than the Index to boot. Not unbearably so, mind, but you add that on top of everything else and it is a real "straw that broke the camel's back" situation.

The conclusion

The Pico 4 Pro is a good headset. It really is. It's definitely a Chinese headset, but it's a good headset. What it isn't, unfortunately, is a good SteamVR headset, or even more specifically a good PC VR Enthusiast headset. If it was only about playing simple games without full body using its own controllers et. al. it would probably be fine, even on PC, but when you add in full body tracking and Index controllers and VRChat lobbies that stress a PC more than Cyberpunk 2077 with maxed-out ray tracing enabled, well, things just break down a little too far to be worth it. I don't think I'm gonna get rid of it, I'll probably keep tinkering with things and see if I can squeeze out some more convenience to make it worthwhile, but for now, at least in VRChat, I think I'll stick with my Index. Even nearly 5 years on it really is still that good.