VR At CES: Facebook Makes China Inroads, Vive Goes Pro

Facebook is getting its foot in the door in China thanks to a virtual reality headset partnership with Xiaomi, a Chinese phone manufacturer.

Having been blocked in China for several years, Facebook just made some inroads into the country with an announcement Monday at CES that Oculus, the social network’s VR company, is launching a headset in China. The headset is called Oculus Go elsewhere, but the Chinese version will go by the name Xiaomi Mi VR, acknowledging Oculus’s “hardware partner,” as Oculus called Xiaomi in a recent blog post.

Mi VR still looks a lot like its original counterpart, but it will offer some unique games along with those that will become available on Oculus Go. Mi VR also has yet to get a price tag and an arrival date, while the Oculus Go headset is priced at $199 and is set to come to users in “early 2018,” according to its website.

In addition to games and social apps, Go will offer 360 degree content from the likes of Netflix, Discovery, and The New York Times—or so its website leads visitors to believe. Some content from the Oculus store is set to head east. “Xiaomi is working directly with Oculus developers to localize some of the most popular content from the Oculus Store and to bring it to the Mi VR Store in China,” said Oculus in the blog post.

Meanwhile at CES, other tech companies are touting their own VR products. HTC showed off its latest version of the Vive VR headset on Monday, the Vive Pro, which boasts higher resolution that the current version of Vive and will include headphones incorporated into its design. As with Mi VR, creators have yet to name a price. Vive Video will now also offer content from Vimeo, specifically curated for Vive.

And, of course, innovators at CES are showcasing types of VR hardware that do things like track users’ brain and eye movements (Looxid) and let users move around in the virtual world with their real world feet (3dRudder). When it comes to consumer adoption, we’ll still be looking to the likes of Oculus and Vive first.