What Display Daily thinks: Who cares what we think? There’s money in selling to the alt-Reality speculators and to the anywhere-Apple-goes-we-go crowd.
According to these recent reports, ByteDance spent a couple of billion dollars on Pico and the promise of VR headsets, they didn’t deliver the numbers, they lay off a third of the workforce, for now, but, and it is a big but, they are still looking at competing with Apple’s Vision Pro because, I just don’t know how to quit you or some such idiom.
Keep selling those microdisplays while the going is good. That’s what I say. As a boss once told me when I was facing a particularly nasty customer who didn’t like dealing with people whose name he had difficulty pronouncing, keep taking the money.
In the meantime, you microdisplay makers, keep clawing away at all those billions being invested in this stuff – whatever you want to call it – no one will remember the failures once there is a success. Just like no one remembers the thousands of dollars they spent on lottery tickets when they win five hundred bucks on a scratch-off.
Bytedance Has Had Enough of VR; Bytedance Will Never Have Enough of VR?
We should have known that something was afoot back in November. Pico cancelled a major VR game and laid off the entire development team while maintaining a rosy disposition. Now, we learn that Pico 4 sales have spooked Bytedance into cancelling the development of the Pico 5 VR headset.
Yet, despite the setback, apparently Bytedance is not about to give up the ghost on VR. The company is working on a high-end VR headset, codenamed Swan, according to The Information, and while the project is largely conceptual, it is aiming to be a commercial product at some point. The target audience is, apparently, the one that Apple is going after with the Vision Pro.
None of this would make sense if it was a real product line with a real market, but in the world of VR, everything is possible as long as you narrow your field of vision, don’t mind getting sick every now and then, and like to sit in room by yourself with a bucket over your head. This may be the closest analogy we have to how VR strategies are formed inside these large corporations.
