{"id":266843,"date":"2025-07-16T14:42:45","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T14:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/266843\/"},"modified":"2025-07-16T14:42:45","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T14:42:45","slug":"oh-great-the-tiktok-people-want-to-strap-ar-goggles-on-your-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/266843\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh Great, the TikTok People Want to Strap AR Goggles on Your Face"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s reportedly a potential new player in AR glasses, and you\u2019ll never guess who it is. I\u2019ll give you a hint: they make the app you\u2019re about to unconsciously check in about 15 seconds. No, not Tinder; get your mind out of the gutter. I\u2019m talking about TikTok<\/a>, or more specifically, ByteDance, which owns TikTok<\/a> and also, according to The Information<\/a>, which cites sources within the company, has aspirations of entering the burgeoning world of XR hardware<\/a>. ByteDance\u2019s entrant, according to the report, is a pair of goggle-like AR glasses that sit somewhere in between Meta\u2019s Quest<\/a> and Apple\u2019s Vision Pro<\/a>, and I have to say\u2026 they sound kind of cool?<\/p>\n

According to The Information, the AR goggles, codenamed Phoenix, will have digital passthrough, which is to say, they\u2019ll have XR similar to what you might see on a Quest 3, and they\u2019ll weigh just 100 grams. That is notably much lighter than the Vision Pro and Meta\u2019s Quest 3, which weigh 650 grams and 515 grams, respectively. That smaller form factor will definitely come with some limitations, though. Reducing the weight is all well and good, but it\u2019s still hard to miniaturize some of the high-end tech found in headsets like Vision Pro\u2014I can\u2019t say for sure, but I wouldn\u2019t expect any high-res micro-OLED display here.<\/p>\n

That being said, the report says that Phoenix will still borrow some of the capabilities from more premium headsets like the Vision Pro, including a UI that\u2019s centered around hand and eye-tracking instead of controllers, just like Apple\u2019s visionOS<\/a> that powers the Vision Pro. While The Information doesn\u2019t say anything about price, I\u2019m going to assume that Phoenix, if it ever sees the light of day, will be much cheaper than the Vision Pro, though that\u2019s not saying much since Apple\u2019s only headset\u2014sorry, \u201cspatial computer\u201d\u2014is still a conversation-ending $3,500. And that last part, if it does pan out to be true, will be very\u00a0important.<\/p>\n

If the report is correct, what we\u2019re looking at here is a lightweight AR headset that, yes, may be a little bit dumber than the rest of the pack, but is also a lot more accessible both weight-wise and monetarily. That\u2019s basically Meta\u2019s playbook with the Quest 3S, which costs just $299 and still does pretty much all of the things you\u2019d want an XR headset to do, just not at a fancy-schmancy Vision Pro level. That lower capability but accessible price and weight strategy has been a fruitful one for Meta. In the first three quarters after its release, Meta sold 3 million Quest 3s<\/a> while Apple sold just an estimated 370,000 Vision Pros.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s not the only Meta product to succeed with that strategy. Meta\u2019s Ray-Ban smart glasses<\/a>, for example, are shells of what competitors like Xreal are putting out\u2014they don\u2019t even have displays in them\u2014but they\u2019ve resonated with people who want something affordable, lightweight, and with just enough features to make the price feel worthwhile. Oh, they also don\u2019t make you look like a total dork when you wear them. XR is still a nascent field at the end of the day, so it\u2019s too early to prognosticate on whether ByteDance\u2019s Phoenix glasses will be any good or anywhere close to successful. As a reality check, ByteDance notably owns the company Pico, which makes VR hardware<\/a> that has yet to really challenge Meta\u2019s Quest dominance. That being said, this is a new product, and ByteDance may nail the strategy with Phoenix. Plus, with TikTok-level resources, it\u2019s hard to count anyone out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s reportedly a potential new player in AR glasses, and you\u2019ll never guess who it is. I\u2019ll give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3162],"tags":[3245,86754,70577,3596,53,449,16,15,3243,3244],"class_list":{"0":"post-266843","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-apple-vision-pro","9":"tag-ar-glasses","10":"tag-bytedance","11":"tag-meta-quest","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-tiktok","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-virtual-reality","17":"tag-vr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114863442920735395","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}