Oh Wonderful, the TikTok Crowd Wants to Put AR Goggles on You

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

According to The Information, the AR goggles, codenamed Phoenix, will have digital passthrough, which is to say, they’ll have XR similar to what you might see on a Quest 3, and they’ll weigh just 100 grams. That is notably much lighter than the Vision Pro and Meta’s 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’s still hard to miniaturize some of the high-end tech found in headsets like Vision Pro—I can’t say for sure, but I wouldn’t expect any high-res micro-OLED display here.

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’s centered around hand and eye-tracking instead of controllers, just like Apple’s visionOS that powers the Vision Pro. While The Information doesn’t say anything about price, I’m going to assume that Phoenix, if it ever sees the light of day, will be much cheaper than the Vision Pro, though that’s not saying much since Apple’s only headset—sorry, “spatial computer”—is still a conversation-ending $3,500. And that last part, if it does pan out to be true, will be very important.

If the report is correct, what we’re 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’s basically Meta’s playbook with the Quest 3S, which costs just $299 and still does pretty much all of the things you’d 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 while Apple sold just an estimated 370,000 Vision Pros.

And that’s not the only Meta product to succeed with that strategy. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, for example, are shells of what competitors like Xreal are putting out—they don’t even have displays in them—but they’ve resonated with people who want something affordable, lightweight, and with just enough features to make the price feel worthwhile. Oh, they also don’t 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’s too early to prognosticate on whether ByteDance’s 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 that has yet to really challenge Meta’s Quest dominance. That being said, this is a new product, and ByteDance may nail the strategy with Phoenix. Plus, with TikTok-level resources, it’s hard to count anyone out.