Facebook and Xiaomi to Launch VR Headset in China -- Update
January 08 2018 - 7:52PM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman
Facebook Inc. and Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi Corp. are
teaming up to launch a virtual-reality headset in China that would
give the American tech giant a toehold in a growing market where
its main business has long been blocked.
The two tech companies are working together to develop a VR
headset sold only in China called Mi VR Standalone, Facebook said
Monday. The new device is modeled after Facebook's Oculus Go, a
previously announced $199 headset that the company plans to launch
outside of China in early 2018.
Xiaomi is also Facebook's manufacturing partner for Oculus Go,
the Silicon Valley company said. Facebook declined to comment on
any revenue-sharing arrangement with Xiaomi, which will take a lead
role in the Mi's rollout.
The Mi headsets will be stamped with the Oculus logo, giving
Facebook's products exposure in China, where the company's services
have been blocked since 2009. Facebook needs to crack the large and
growing China market to meet its previously stated goal of
"connecting the world," but Chinese officials show few signs of
changing their policy.
Facebook executives spent years publicly courting Chinese
officials, making Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg more visible and
internally developing a tool that people familiar with the matter
say would have allowed third parties -- including governments like
China -- to block content before it could be posted on
Facebook.
More recently, however, Facebook has adopted a quieter approach.
Last May, the company covertly launched a photo-sharing app in
China called Colorful Balloons under the name of a different
company.
The latest Xiaomi deal is partly the handiwork of Hugo Barra,
the former Xiaomi executive who joined Facebook a year ago to
oversee the social-media company's virtual-reality efforts. Mr.
Barra's portfolio includes Oculus VR, which Facebook bought for
more than $2 billion in 2014.
The two companies won't share any data about their users, a
Facebook spokeswoman said. Users of the Xiaomi headset won't be
able to access the main Facebook service, used by more than two
billion people a month world-wide, but developers working with the
Oculus platform will be able to share their content to the Mi
platform in China.
Both Oculus Go and Xiaomi Mi are standalone headsets that don't
require a personal computer or mobile phone to work. That is unlike
Oculus's debut device, the Rift virtual-reality goggles, which need
to be tethered to a powerful computer to work, or the Samsung Gear
VR, a smartphone-powered headset jointly developed by Facebook and
Samsung Electronics Co.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 08, 2018 19:37 ET (00:37 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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