With Apple reportedly working on not just the forthcoming Vision Pro headset but as many as four successors, it's clearly expecting VR to be a big market. And it's not the only one. The likes of Microsoft and Meta have been joined by an old Apple foe: Huawei.
Contrary to previous suggestions that smartphone firms were steering clear of the VR market for now, a new report says that Huawei is working on its own premium mixed reality headset featuring a "flagship" chipset and a clever heat dissipation system to deliver maximum performance without melting your head.
The report comes from tipster Mochamad Farido Fanani on X, who seems to have a good track record on smartphone leaks. According to Fanani, "Huawei will have a VR glasses product next year, equipped with a flagship processor" and it'll support external batteries, much like Vision Pro does. Huawei's sub-brand Honor is apparently also working on a headset. However as with any single-source rumour it's wise to take this all with a pinch of salt until there's corroboration from other sources.
Can Huawei take on Apple's VR vision?
From a hardware perspective, we already know that it does: Huawei has already released VR headsets such as its VR Glass and the Huawei VR 2 pictured above. But while Huawei's hardware has been pretty impressive and pretty well priced, the secret to virtual or mixed reality success isn't what you strap to your head but what you can do with it. And so far Apple seems to have a better idea of what that will be than other firms, as we've seen from the Vision Pro demos so far.
As the owner of various Meta headsets and two generations of PSVR, I've become very familiar with the problem of virtual and/or mixed reality being a novelty: without compelling content, expensive headsets can quickly become expensive ornaments. Like the characters keen to find the answer to life, the universe and everything in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, it's not enough to know what the answer is: you need to know what the question is too.
What's the question to which "a premium Huawei mixed reality headset" is the answer to? Hopefully we'll find out in 2024.
