In the last few months, Meta has seemingly taken its foot off the gas when it comes to developing next-generation VR hardware and experiences. The Beijing-based Chinese competitor, ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, is going the other way — and it appears focused on expanding its work beyond just gaming.
The Pico Project Swan, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, is a lot of head hardware. Coming “later this year,” according to ByteDance, it doesn’t sound cheap. An onboard micro OLED display will have 40 pixels per degree of resolution density, which should be in line with what the Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR offer. The headset will have similar capabilities to create mixed-reality overlays of graphics in real-world settings using passthrough cameras.
The headset is also powered by its own dual-chip custom processors that ByteDance claims are twice as powerful as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip that’s on Meta’s Quest 3 and 3S headsets, and in a stepped-up version on Samsung Galaxy XR. While that may still lag behind Apple’s M5 chip on the Vision Pro, it’s a lot for a mixed reality headset.
As for the price of Project Swan and what software it’ll run, that’s still a mystery. Pico headsets already run Android apps and can connect to Windows PCs, but the landscape of VR/AR is changing rapidly.
Apple and Samsung’s headsets feel like prototypes for future computers that still don’t have enough unique software yet. Meta’s emphasis on smaller AR glasses to come mirrors planned moves by Google and Samsung, and Apple could be following suit.
Meanwhile, Valve’s gaming-focused Steam Frame headset, coming later this year, shows another interesting wrinkle in the mix. Valve is running Steam on smaller ARM chips, which could mean Steam OS running on other XR hardware after that. Running more types of software on smaller chipsets is exactly what VR headsets needed more of in the first place.
I’m curious about Project Swan, though. At the least, it shows that other companies are keeping the ball rolling on high-end headsets, even if Meta currently seems not to be.
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