ByteDance acquires the Chinese start-up PoliQ, which specializes in virtual reality. This is an additional step in the construction of its metaverse.
ByteDance continues to lay bricks to build its metaverse. New illustration with the purchase of the Chinese start-up PoliQ, specialized in virtual reality (VR), as reported by the South China Morning Post. This company is particularly known for having developed the virtual social platform Vyou. According to the Chinese firm Tianyancha, which compiles company data, the amount of the operation would amount to tens of millions of yuan.
This acquisition will strengthen the division of ByteDance dedicated to virtual reality. In this context, the start-up will be absorbed by Pico, a manufacturer of virtual reality headsets acquired in 2021 by the Chinese group for 772 million dollars, marking the entry of the parent company of TikTok into the metaverse. Like Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, ByteDance executives believe that the future of social platforms will depend in part on mixed reality experiences.
Result of the merger with the Chinese giant, the founder of PoliQ, Ma Jiesi, will take the head of the Pico department dedicated to innovations on social networks. The US-educated entrepreneur previously ran Xiaomi’s VR unit. Within the Chinese smartphone giant, he notably managed the collaboration with the manufacturer of VR headsets Oculus, acquired by Meta in 2014, and launched the Chinese version of the Oculus Go.
This expertise will be useful to ByteDance in designing new VR headsets and other products needed to allow users to interact with each other in the metaverse, whose ambition is to become the digital understudy of the real world. The Chinese giant has also partnered with Qualcomm, a US heavyweight in the semiconductor industry, to develop immersive technologies that will optimize the user experience in the metaverse.
By multiplying partnerships and acquisitions in this sector, ByteDance hopes not to be left behind by local competitors such as Tencent and Baidu. The global metaverse market is expected to generate $5 trillion by 2030, according to a McKinsey report. As more and more players are embarking on this new technological Eldorado, several companies, including Alibaba, Huawei, Meta and Qualcomm have come together to form the Metaverse Standards Forum group. This initiative should make it possible to promote the development of standards aimed at making the virtual worlds of these firms compatible with each other. For the time being, ByteDance is not one of them, while the Chinese group now has enormous influence on a global scale. Proof of this is that TikTok became the most visited site in the world in 2021, ahead of Google.