Consumers check out Pico products at a flagship store in Beijing. The Chinese virtual reality headset maker Pico, owned by tech company ByteDance, is stepping up its efforts to popularize VR and build a thriving content ecosystem amid increased competition.
Pico unveiled its latest VR headset on Tuesday in its first major launch event after ByteDance acquired the company a year ago.
The Pico 4 series, which is the latest generation of all-in-one VR devices, is expected to compete with the US company Meta's Oculus Quest 2 VR headset in Europe, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and other overseas markets, priced from 2,499 yuan $345.4.
President of Pico, Zhou Hongwei, said today that they are on the road to popularize VR in China through Pico 4, and they will bring a new product experience and content ecology to more users. Pico 4 is the first VR device that many users think will be the first one they buy. According to market research company International Data Corp, VR headset shipments in China reached 558,000 units in the first half of this year and annual shipments are expected to exceed 28 million units in 2025.
The Pico 4 Pro features a number of cutting-edge technologies, including three more infrared cameras than the Pico 4 version, and it supports eye-movement tracking and facial expressions.
Pico is ratcheting up resources to cultivate VR content. It has set up a wealth of VR content, including four scenarios - VR sports and fitness, VR video, VR entertainment and VR creation. Pico 4 has an application that integrates personal training courses, yoga and other sports by taking sports and fitness as an example.
Pico has developed a fitness monitoring algorithm that can help calculate calories burned based on body data and movement trajectories, making VR sports a new lifestyle.
Pico will launch a VR interactive narrative work named The Three-Body Problem next year, which is based on a science fiction novel written by Chinese writer Liu Cixin.
At the news conference, Pico announced that it would bring its own social platform Project PICO Worlds next year. This platform will provide users with a number of tools to customize their digital avatars and worlds.
According to Yu Jianing, co-author of Metaverse and principal of Huobi University, a research and educational institution focusing on frontier technologies, the move came as digital avatars have become a crucial way for users to enter the metaverse, which promises integration of virtual and real worlds.
As metaverse continues to be a tech buzzword that attracts the attention of both established tech companies and startups, interest in VR and AR has been revived and has hit a new high, Yu added.
VR and AR are key components of the metaverse, a concept that loosely refers to a world of virtual communities where people can meet, work and play, using technologies such as VR headsets and AR glasses.
The popularity of VR is hampered by the lack of quality content. Given ByteDance's abundant content resources, such as short videos and its willingness to develop self-made content, Pico will have advantages in this respect, said Fu Liang, an independent tech analyst.