Ex-Apple engineer unveils chip to rival Vision Pro for XR headsets, AI glasses

A Chinese start-up founded by a Stanford University graduate, who previously worked for Apple’s extended reality (XR) unit, is attracting attention for developing a chip that can power headsets and artificial intelligence glasses.

Founded by Wang Chaohao, GravityXR last week showcased China’s first all-in-one mixed reality (MR) chip, the Jizhi G-X100, which uses the advanced 5-nanometre node.

The product, part of a new line of chips that claim to surpass Apple in certain metrics, has attracted interest as the core component for future gadgets such as lightweight AI glasses and high-end XR headsets like Apple’s Pro Vision.

The G-X100 features a photon-to-photon latency (PTP) of just 9 milliseconds, faster than 12 ms for Apple’s Vision Pro, the Chinese company said in a statement.

Yongjiang Lab in Ningbo, an incubator backed by the provincial government of Zhejiang that backed Wang’s venture in its early days, said the chip was “a significant breakthrough for China in the area of spatial computing”.

Spatial computing is a field of science that enables computing equipment to “see” the real world and combine that into a virtual world in the form of extended reality.