Bytedance’s upcoming project Swan VR Headphone wants to become Meta PC – not yet

In the past few months, Meta seems to have emerged She took her foot off the gas When it comes to developing next-generation virtual reality hardware and experiences. Beijing-based Chinese competitor ByteDance, which created TikTok, is going in the other direction and appears focused on expanding its business beyond just gaming.

the Pico Swan Projectannounced in Mobile World Congress In Barcelona this week, there is a lot of head hardware. It’s coming “later this year” according to ByteDance, and it doesn’t look cheap. The integrated micro OLED display will have 40 pixels per pixel density, which should be in line with what… Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR displays. The headset will have similar capabilities for creating mixed reality graphics overlays in real-world settings using transit cameras.

The headset is also powered by its own custom dual-chip processors which ByteDance claims are twice as powerful as Qualcomm processors. Snapdragon XR2 2nd generation existing slide Meta Quest 3 And headphones 3S, and in a Upgraded version On Samsung Galaxy XR. While this may still lag behind Apple’s M5 chip in the Vision Pro, it’s a lot for a mixed reality headset.

As for the price of Project Swan and the software it will run, that remains a mystery. Pico headsets already run Android apps and can connect to Windows PCs, but the VR/AR landscape is changing quickly.

Headphones from Apple and Samsung look like prototypes of future computers that still don’t have enough unique software yet. Dead focus on Smaller AR glasses Mirrors of the planned moves come Google and SamsungIt is possible that Apple will follow suit.

Meanwhile, Valve is focusing on gaming Steam frame The headset, coming later this year, shows another interesting wrinkle in the mix. Valve runs Steam on smaller ARM chips, which could mean Steam OS running on other XR devices next. Running more types of software on smaller chips is exactly what VR headsets needed in the first place.

I’m curious about the Swan project, though. At the very least, this shows that other companies are continuing to develop high-end headsets, even if Meta isn’t at the moment.