ByteDance’s main hardware focus now is the development of a high-end Apple Vision Pro competitor incorporating “cutting-edge technologies”, a project which Osawa reports is codenamed Swan. This Swan project is “still largely experimental and conceptual” though, Osawa writes, and there’s no clear timeline for it to become an actual product.
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I might be wrong, but I don’t feel like chasing after the Vision Pro will lead to huge success. The VP will have a huge library of iOS/iPadOS Apps as well as a developer community and ecosystem integrations. That and what sounds like impressive tech that may not be easy to reproduce. I don’t see it working out for them.
They probably looked at Apple’s margins and thought this was the easier approach. But I actually think Apple never had lower margins than with the Vision Pro. And it’s still too expensive for a big market.
Maybe the Pico 4 isn’t selling well. I don’t know.
For sure their current products aren’t working as well as they were hoping, otherwise they wouldn’t change course.
Competing with Facebook headsets for value per dollar might end up leaving them with a worse enough profit margin that significantly lower sales of a competitor to Apple might bring in more money overall.
But there is also alot of tech right now that is feasible to put in a headset, just not cheap enough yet. So it could be just that they have worked out what they feel will be a winning combination at a certain price point.
I feel like software is the biggest issue - there isn’t (yet?) a google play store for Apps that can be used in VR and with even the best hardware, it’s no good if there’s nothing you can do with it.
There was a VR store specifically from Google when they made VR headsets, but they were doing OK, which means they got canned as per Google usual. They still technically have Cardboard, and it has it’s own store, but I don’t know what state it’s in currently.
But assuming you mean a VR store that is platform agnostic, I think the best bet is still itch.io. All the good VR stores are indeed otherwise the ones specifically for the headset you have. But each of the walled garden stores tend to have most of the games and apps that exist other than ones they personally funded. The store for Pico headsets has plenty of good games and apps. The Facebook store is still the best, but only because they have funded the most games and apps. Otherwise they have the same content.
But yeah, there is alot of content. I personally own over 100 VR games and I only buy a select few. There is over 1000 games, more than many consoles have at the end of their run. And non-game apps are similarly doing quite well. No shortage of content now. I would say still a shortage of triple A content, but even that is getting less and less month by month.
And that’s to say nothing of PCVR, the bar for entry level PCVR hardware is so accessible now that very few people at all interested in playing games won’t already have a computer that can do VR. My VR computer is 8 years old now. And there are a ton of games for PCVR, and SteamVR is nearly platform agnostic, it does have to specifically support your headset, but they have a pretty long list of supported headsets. I do think we are nearing the end of the minimum VR spec being held at where it was when it started. But it has been there for almost 10 years now, so that should be enough time for people to have caught up and passed it if they have at all been interested in playing videogames on a computer.
Wireless PCVR with standalone headsets is also pretty platform agnostic, they mostly all have their own proprietary first party solution, but Virtual Desktop supports almost all hardware and is a great choice, often better than the first party solutions for even the best headsets.
The meta store is alright for VR games, but quite terrible for anything that’s not a game. And chasing the VP probably means very little VR games (and hand tracking only), so I’d be looking for non-gaming apps that run in VR. And there’s basically nothing out there, Apple will probably have the biggest one due to their iOS/iPadOS ports.
