Pico Neo 3 Pro is getting a high quality hand tracking accessory from Ultraleap.
Pico was a China-based startup which launched the first standalone VR headset, Pico Goblin, a year before Oculus Go. Last year it was acquired by ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant behind the TikTok social media platform. Pico’s latest model, Neo 3 Pro, has remarkably similar specs and design to Meta’s Quest 2. But in western markets Pico currently only sells to businesses, not consumers, and it lacks built in controller free hand tracking.
The Ultraleap hand tracking bundle will be formally released in summer. It includes the headset, Ultraleap’s Stereo IR 170 tracker, and a bespoke mount pre-attached with Ultraleap’s software pre-installed.
I had the chance to try Ultraleap’s latest technology at CES 2022. The hand tracking quality was significantly better than Quest 2 – the virtual hands seemed to match my own precisely and with no perceptible latency, and I could even interlock my fingers. Only by almost entirely occluding one hand did tracking start to fail.
For now an “early access” bundle is available for “developers, evaluation, and proof of concepts”, but Ultraleap cautions this is not suitable for scalable deployments as the tracker currently lacks the European Economic Area’s CE regulatory marking. The bundle is priced at €999 in Europe, sold by Bestware and VR Expert. In the US it’s sold by Mace Virtual Labs.
Businesses may be able to buy the tracker separately and attach it to their own Pico Neo 3 Pro, but that wouldn’t include the mount or software license.
