On March 20, 2023, the PICO XR Twitter profile revealed that new information on PICO 4, the ByteDance viewer, would arrive on March 22. That date has passed and nothing has been revealed: why? According to a report by Sean Hollister of The Verge, ByteDance has decided to put the plans for the headset on hold as it is currently busy with the cause of TikTok, of which it is the parent company.
Hollister wrote: “An employee told me that Pico had plans to release the promising Pico 4 in the US, but is holding off because its parent company is currently under fire in Washington for a much better known product: TikTok.”
In case you don’t know, you should know that the TikTok social app is currently at the center of a hearing of the United States of America Congress, which must decide whether to block the application on American soil. Basically, US politicians fear that the application is being used by the Chinese government to access user data and influence the type of content presented by the algorithm. ByteDance bought Pico in 2021.
Pico 4 is already available in Italy but it is not yet available in the USA. The American public is waiting for this new viewer, considered as a first opponent of Meta Quest 2. Pico 44 mounts the same processor as Quest 2, Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1, but with a series of improvements; for example, it is lighter and offers a higher resolution. Pico will also have a big exclusive in 2023: Just Dance VR.
We remind you that what is reported remains a rumor, not an official information. We’ll have to wait for Pico to reveal more information about the headset.
TikTok and video games might seem like worlds away, but according to a report, TikTok wants to bet heavily on video games.
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