I promised to keep you informed about the cool things I could have tried in China. And I’m keeping my promise with this article in which I tell you about my hands-on with the GravityXR reference design VR headsets. I’m pretty sure you will love it, because one of these headsets is incredibly small… probably the smallest VR headset I’ve ever tried until now!
GravityXR is a Chinese company based in Shanghai that specializes in the design and production of chips for AR/VR headsets. I thought in the beginning that this company was a sort of headset manufacturer, but actually, they don’t do headsets; they create the chips and the reference designs for the OEMs to use to produce their own headsets.
Imagine it as a sort of “Chinese Qualcomm”. The two companies don’t exactly do the same things (for instance, I’ve been told that Qualcomm does System-on-Chip devices, which GravityXR usually doesn’t do), but I guess the comparison conveys the idea. The company can cooperate with vendors in various ways. For instance, they can just provide the chips, and the companies can build a whole headset around it. Or they can provide the chips and the reference designs, and the OEMs may start from this to create their own XR products more easily.
The company was established in 2021. Since then, it has received various funding rounds and now is able to offer a few chipsets and reference designs.
Damn. These look impressive. After so many years of not seeing this sort of progress, it’s surprising to finally see it happening.
And by surprising, I mean exciting. The Beyond is cool. And I have one. But seeing things get even smaller and the small form factors still being pushed is exciting.
I guess what I’m expressing is: some hope that my slow disillusionment with where hardware can and will go is being turned around.