Pico’s Next Standalone VR Headset Seems to Be a ‘Pico 4S’ Refresh

ByteDance’s virtual reality arm Pico that finds itself at the center of some speculative chatter about an inbound product refresh.

Images purporting to depict the controllers for a “Pico 4S” headset have surfaced online, alongside a trademark filing from Pico for that very same name. The leak comes courtesy of one @Lunayian on X/Twitter, who claims to have extracted a 3D model of the alleged 4S’ right controller from Pico’s software.

The rendered controller sports a noticeably different design from the ones packaged with Pico’s current Pico 4 headset. Most notably, it appears to have ditched the ring used for tracking—suggesting either updated tracking tech or simply different ergonomics.

Lending credence to the leak is Pico’s December 2023 trademark filing for “Pico 4S” in multiple territories. The straightforward naming convention implies we could simply be looking at a hardware revision of last year’s Pico 4, rather than an entirely new generation.

Of course, the “S” nomenclature is open to interpretation. It could signal a souped-up “Pro” variant akin to recent iPhone releases, or Pico may have grander plans to replace the 4 outright. The VR headset space is as competitive as ever, after all.

Some previous rumors had ByteDance setting its sights on a proper “Pico 5” to take on heavyweight rivals like Meta’s Quest 3 and Apple’s Vision Pro headset. Perhaps those plans have been shelved or scaled back to a simple 4S iteration first.

Either way, Pico has already confirmed it will have a presence at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next month—an ideal venue to unveil any new hardware on the horizon. We’ll just have to wait and see if the Pico 4S leaks prove accurate when the company inevitably teases its next VR moves.