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PICO 4 Ultra Gets Free Window Positioning, 3D Recording, 3D Photo Conversion & More
Pico 4 Ultra OS 5.13.0 brings free window positioning, 3D screen recording, 2D to 3D image conversion, and more.
Pico 4 Ultra OS 5.13.0 brings free window positioning, 3D screen recording, 2D to 3D image conversion, and more.
The update arrives around six months after the launch of Pico 4 Ultra, and greatly enhances its spatial computing capabilities.
ByteDance's Pico 4 Ultra is arguably the only direct competitor to Quest 3, and the only other headset on the market to use the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset. But like its predecessor, Pico 4 Ultra is not available in North America.
Free Window Positioning
While Apple's visionOS has let you freely position 2D windows since Vision Pro's launch, and Meta's Horizon OS for its Quest headsets has since last year, Pico OS until now took a different approach. You could only move them along the surface of an invisible 360° bubble centered on your position, meaning every window was at the same distance from you, and we criticized this in our hands-on impressions.
Now, with Pico OS 5.13.0, this restriction is gone. As with visionOS and Horizon OS, you can freely position windows exactly where you want them, including adjusting their distance.
2D To 3D Image Conversion
Pico 4 Ultra can now convert any image in your gallery into a 3D image, including batch conversion of many at once.
Apple Vision Pro got this feature in visionOS 2 in September.
Pico OS 5.13.0 also adds the ability to view Spatial Photos taken with your iPhone 16, something currently only possible on Apple Vision Pro.
3D Screen Recording
Pico OS 5.13.0 adds the ability for Pico 4 Ultra to screen record in 3D. The headset could already capture 3D videos from the passthrough cameras, but this now includes VR and mixed reality objects and interfaces.
This is a unique and interesting feature that we haven't seen on any other headset.
Override Graphics & Performance Options
Pico OS 5.13.0 adds the ability to override key graphics and performance options normally set by each app via a new app called Performance Tuner.
This includes the screen refresh rate, render resolution, CPU and GPU levels, fixed foveated rendering extremity, and more.
Performance Tuner is intended for developers, and requires developer mode to be enabled.
Improved Passthrough & Hand Tracking
With Pico OS 5.13.0, ByteDance says it has improved the quality of passthrough in low-light conditions.
It also says it has improved hand tracking, with the following improvements:
• Reduced latency and false touch occurrences.
• Improved tracking stability in low-light conditions.
• Enhanced gesture accuracy and fidelity.
• Improved alignment between virtual hand models and real hands in Seethrough mode.
• Fixed an issue where hand rotation would interrupt dragging.
Improved Motion Tracker Body Tracking
Pico OS 5.13.0 also brings improved body tracking quality. Body tracking on Pico is driven by the Pico Trackers accessory, which by default you strap to your ankles.
David Heaney
Here are the improvements ByteDance says it has made:
• Enhanced posture stability during prolonged periods of sitting or lying down, reducing virtual character drifting and standing errors.
• Increased update frequency of full-body motion tracking data, improving motion smoothness.
• Improved flexibility and accuracy of complex lying positions, providing a better experience when used with the waist tracker.
