TikTok owner ByteDance doubles down on Pico as it moves senior managers to virtual reality unit
- The news is another boost for the VR unit after it announced earlier this week a partnership with chip giant Qualcomm
- Founded in 2015, Pico topped the China VR market with a share of more than 50 per cent in the second quarter, according to IDC
ByteDance has decided to assign three managers from its short video unit to its virtual reality subsidiary Pico Interactive, a start-up that the owner of TikTok acquired last year and signalling its commitment to the futuristic technology.
Song Binghua and Wu Zuomin, currently in charge of entertainment content at short video service Douyin, TikTok’s China version, as well as Ren Lifeng, who co-created Douyin and then headed ByteDance’s Xigua Video app, will join Pico soon, people familiar with the matter but who declined to be named as the information is not public yet, told the South China Morning Post.
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Tech companies in China chase metaverse opportunities in immersive virtual online world
XR is an umbrella term for immersive technologies such as VR and augmented reality (AR). Both VR and AR are regarded as fundamental to the development of the metaverse – a shared virtual environment that users access online, seen by many as the future of the internet.
ByteDance has been expanding the Pico team, which has grown to more than 300 employees from 200 in September last year, Chinese media title LatePost recently reported.
Founded in 2015, Pico has grown so fast that it topped the China VR market with a share of more than 50 per cent in the second quarter, according to market research firm IDC.
In 2021, Pico sold roughly 500,000 units of its VR devices, LatePost reported. That is still a fraction of the Oculus Quest 2 from Meta, formerly known as Facebook, which sold 10 million units between its launch in September 2020 and November 2021 when Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon announced the figure. Qualcomm is also a partner with Meta.