It’s been awhile since we heard from Chinese VR headset brand PICO. But the company has been plugging away on both the software and hardware side of things. Today, the company basically made two announcements. One is that it is launching its PICO OS 6. The other is that it’s working on its next flagship VR headset, currently codenamed Project Swan.
Let’s go over the latter first. The brand claims that Project Swan “aims to address the biggest bottlenecks in the industry”. First among them is clarity, and to solve that, the company says it’s using “a new generation of Micro OLED displays with a pixel density of nearly 4,000 PPI”.
Next on the list is “the complex pipeline of mixed reality”, with the brand saying it’s going down the dual-chip design for this. The company says that it will be using “custom XR silicon”, as well as “a flagship SoC” that “delivers more than double the increase in CPU and GPU performance over the [Qualcomm Snapdragon] XR2 Gen 2”.
Next, the PICO OS 6, which the brand claims “is not a mere incremental update”. Per the announcement, the company says this new OS features the new PICO Spatial Engine. This “moves the the rendering to the OS level” where it was previously “siloed at the app level”. With the help of the aforementioned dual-chip setup, this “allows the system to render 2D apps, 3D objects, virtual environments, and physical reality simultaneously while maintaining great responsiveness”.
The company claims its new OS will also support a variety of ecosystems, from OpenXR, WebXR Android apps, web apps or PC VR streaming. For devs, it also “deepens support for Unity and Unreal Engine”.
With all that being said, PICO does not say if its OS 6 will be available for its existing headsets. If it’s exclusive to the upcoming Project Swan headset, then chances are they will be released alongside one another. And the headset is only slated for release sometime in late 2026. In the meantime, the company has the Global Early Access Program for both the new OS and headset. The brand says it’s looking for “experienced users to participate in a closed beta test” for them. Those interested can sign up by heading to picoxr.com.
