TikTok’s parent company is gearing up to invest a lot of money in VR

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

According to a report from Protocol, the company that owns TikTok is serious about entering the virtual reality space. A source close to the situation told the outlet that the company is going to invest tons of money to create content related to virtual reality.

ByteDance is investing a lot of money into hiring. Over 40 job listings have popped up for Pico, the Chinese company that was acquired by ByteDance. There are a lot of openings for Pico Studios on the west coast. An optical engineer and a systems design electrical engineer are both open positions.

Pico is looking to establish a presence in the US according to Protocol. Candidates will be responsible for the sales and marketing of Pico in the US consumer market.

ByteDance has the bandwidth to give Pico the push it needs to compete with mainstream headsets in the US. The Pico Neo 3 Link is the company's flagship all-in-one headset and is available in Europe.

It's the same as the $299 variant of the Meta Quest 2, with the exception of the 128 gigabytes variant. The headsets have the same storage and resolution. When hooking up the headset to your PC, the Neo 3 Link comes with an additional headset strap and a DisplayPort connection instead of the standardusb-c connection. It looks like the Neo 3 Link is going to be an in-between option for people who don't want to spend a lot of money on games, but also want something a little more out-of-the-box.