Today I will talk about a cheaper alternative to the Meta Quest 3, the PICO 4, a virtual reality headset that shares pretty much all the same features but is around $50 cheaper than the Meta Quest 3.
Unboxing and Initial Setup:
All right, I’m interested in trying out the Pico 4 again. Now, this is going to be the first time I’m testing this headset. I did get one back in, I think it was 2022 when it first launched. When the Pico 4 first came out, it was ahead of the Quest 2.
It had a full-color passthrough camera and a bunch of other features that made it a pretty capable headset, It has a 5300mAh battery, and it’s still got a lot of features that keep it on par with a lot of its competitors currently in the marketplace, even with the newer Meta Quest 3.
The setup of the Pico 4 is fairly straightforward. Inside the box, you get all the accessories: the headset, two controllers, and a Type-C charging cable. First, you will want to attach the safety straps to the controllers so you can dangle them from your wrist.
Game Installation and Management:
So I now need to install some games onto this headset so I can try them out. Thankfully, with the Pico app on your smartphone, you can browse the store, purchase games, figure out what you want to play next, and add it to a wishlist much quicker.
Let’s talk about some of the other features that you can access within the mobile app. There is this cool mixed reality capture that you can set up, where you can use your smartphone to film videos of yourself placed inside the virtual reality environments that you’re exploring within the headset.
This is all done within the Pico app and is very fast and easy to set up. It’s quite useful if you want to do any form of content creation or just share some clips with your friends.
On the topic of friends, you can also add and manage your friends list within the Pico app. Unfortunately, I don’t have any right now, so this is a little bit embarrassing for this segment.
There’s also the community tab that lets you see what other users are currently doing on their headsets, get updates on the product, and find the latest and greatest games that people are playing each month.
One thing I must admit, I’m impressed with the overall fidelity and the pixel density of the screens. The text is very easy to read when it comes to the headset itself.
One thing I have noticed while we load into a game is that there are some fans inside the headset located near the screen. The screens get hot while you game, so those fans are intended to keep that area cooler, keeping your eyes and face cool.
This is perfectly fine if you don’t wear contact lenses. When I tried this headset out about a year or so ago, I was using my glasses, but I now have contact lenses.
I have noticed that these fans do—well, I wouldn’t say they dry your eyes out—but when you have contact lenses in, you’re a little more susceptible to drying of the eye.
That’s just something to be aware of if you are a glasses user and predominantly use contact lenses.
Gameplay Tips and Experiences:
Let’s go ahead and jump into some games and see what the performance of this headset is like. I feel like sports games are the perfect title to first get used to playing virtual reality games.
A lot of people suffer from VR sickness when they have a VR gaming headset. That’s because they’re going through an experience that their brain has never seen before. It’s super fast-paced, which can make them feel a little overwhelmed in the headset.
But games like sports, ping pong, or table tennis are perfect in virtual reality to ease you into the experience of VR because your body’s already used to these motions and the spatial awareness of a ping pong table.
I did like trying to play ping pong as a kid. We had a table in the garden, but all my siblings are way older than me—they’re like 15 years older than me—so I never had anyone to play with. But now I’ve got this random cat that I can play with inside of my VR headset. It’s pretty fun.
Of course, there are a whole load of other types of games that are pretty advanced experiences on virtual reality headsets.
We’re going to jump into one of them next that will show off the graphical capabilities and the immersive experiences that you can have with storytelling games, single-player titles, and also some pretty cool multiplayer games that are pretty immersive in the FPS shooter genres.
Practical Considerations of PICO 4:
If you are wondering, the Pico 4 is also compatible with mixed reality because it has a full-color passthrough camera. This was one of the first VR headsets to have a full-color passthrough camera before the Quest 2, which just had a black-and-white one.
Personally, using the stick is probably going to cause a little more motion sickness, just using that to turn like, “Whoa!” So just turning around like this is going to be way more natural, and then you can just use this thumbstick to walk. I bet you could even probably pretend to walk in your head—like, I’m walking right now—so that feels a little more natural.
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So that could be an option, I guess. The problem with most VR games, in my opinion, especially since I had the very first Oculus, the CV1, is the quality of that headset, although the technology was cool and you had all of the tracking available, the problem was the graphics just sucked in terms of the pixel resolution of each screen. But this headset, the Pico 4, has high-fidelity screens, and everything is crystal clear.
Overall, I am incredibly impressed with the performance of this headset, especially for the price point. The displays are very impressive, the full-color passthrough camera is extremely handy and very useful for a range of mixed-reality games.
