ByteDance has reshuffled the leadership of Pico, its extended reality (XR) business, according to 36Kr. Founder Henry Zhou will step down as head of Pico to pursue other career opportunities. Li Xiaokai will succeed Zhou and assume full responsibility for the business.
People familiar with the matter said the transition will not affect Pico’s established strategy, R&D efforts, or product roadmap. The company remains on track to introduce a new mixed reality (MR) headset later this year.
Zhou played a central role in building Pico over the past 11 years. The company has announced his departure internally and thanked him for his long-term commitment and contributions.
Li has years of experience in consumer electronics and hardware product development and management. Since joining Pico in 2021, he has overseen the company’s core products and technology development, leading teams responsible for MR products and next-generation technologies while strengthening Pico’s capabilities in optical displays, chips, perception, and system architecture.
A ByteDance insider said that the company has not changed its long-term view of XR’s strategic value and will continue supporting Pico’s efforts in technology research and product innovation.
Leadership passes from Henry Zhou to Li Xiaokai
According to publicly available information, Li earned a bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University and a doctorate from Yale University, where he studied optoelectronic materials and devices.
Li joined ByteDance as the company was preparing to acquire Pico.
At the time, he coordinated work between ByteDance and Pico during the acquisition while recruiting talent in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. The recruitment effort covered various areas including optical displays, sensors, the human visual system, color science, and imaging technology, among other related fields.
ByteDance completed its acquisition of Pico in August 2021. After the deal, Li joined the Pico organization, and responsibilities expanded to include the development of core products and foundational technologies.
Before founding Pico, Zhou spent nearly a decade at Goertek, where he served as vice president. In 2015, he led a group of former Goertek employees in establishing Pico, focusing on standalone virtual reality (VR) headsets.
Goertek remained a long-term supply chain partner after Pico’s founding. Before the ByteDance acquisition, Pico had launched products including the Pico Neo series.
Zhou continued to lead Pico after the acquisition and oversaw the launches of the Pico Neo 3, Pico 4, and Pico 4 Ultra.
In August 2024, Zhou attended the Pico 4 Ultra launch in his capacity as Pico president. During the event, he revealed that the Pico app store had grown to more than 900 applications and had over 500 development partners, while the business had expanded into more than 60 countries and regions.
The Pico 4 Ultra was the final major hardware product introduced during Zhou’s tenure. As Pico prepares to enter the launch cycle for its next-generation MR device, responsibility for its product roadmap has passed to Li.
Pico shifts toward next-generation MR products
In March, Pico officially introduced Pico OS 6, its next-generation operating system, and previewed its next-generation flagship MR headset for the first time. The device, codenamed Project Swan, is reportedly scheduled for release later this year.
According to publicly available information, Project Swan will use a micro OLED display solution and an MR chip developed in-house by Pico.
The headset is expected to deliver an average angular resolution of approximately 40 pixels per degree (PPD), with the central viewing area exceeding 45 PPD. Angular resolution measures the number of pixels visible within a given field of view, with higher values producing sharper text and images.
Pico said its proprietary chip is designed to handle real-time sensing, spatial computing, and imaging tasks, reducing system perception latency to as low as 12 milliseconds. Project Swan will also employ a dual-chip architecture, with a separate main processor responsible for general computing and graphics rendering.
Pico OS 6 broadens the company’s product focus beyond traditional VR applications and into spatial computing.
According to Pico, the new operating system supports the simultaneous use of Android applications, web browsers, and 3D content within a spatial environment. It also supports OpenXR, WebXR, and PC VR streaming. Pico has introduced a desktop simulator as well, allowing developers to debug certain spatial applications without requiring a headset.
Based on its announced specifications, Project Swan more closely resembles high-end MR devices such as Apple’s Vision Pro and Samsung’s Galaxy XR than conventional VR headsets. It reflects Pico’s broader shift from VR gaming toward multitasking, productivity, spatial applications, and immersive content.
That direction is consistent with how ByteDance has positioned Pico over the past three years.
In November last year, Yang Zhenyuan, ByteDance vice president of technology, publicly outlined the company’s two-pronged product strategy. Yang was speaking during ByteDance’s fifth scholarship awards ceremony.
Yang said ByteDance’s growth has long been closely tied to advances in hardware. Large-screen smartphones and high-definition cameras helped lay the foundation for products such as Douyin and TikTok, while XR could enable the next generation of human-computer interaction.
According to Yang, ByteDance initially pursued two strategies after acquiring Pico. One involved investing in content, live streaming, and marketing for Pico’s existing product lineup, while the other emphasized foundational technologies aimed at improving the user experience.
“In 2023, we decided to reduce our marketing budget and concentrate on refining our products, allocating more resources to technology and user experience innovation,” Yang said. “The adjustment also created some misunderstandings. Many people assumed ByteDance had abandoned this area. In fact, the opposite is true. Since 2023, ByteDance has invested more in XR technology than ever before.”
Yang said Pico began developing its own XR chip in 2022. The chip completed tapeout in 2024 and has since entered mass production. During the same period, the company advanced technologies including micro OLED displays, microlenses, gesture recognition, and spatial perception.
Pico wasa China’s largest consumer VR headset vendor in 2024.
According to CINNO Research, about 567,000 consumer XR devices were sold in China in 2024. Pico accounted for roughly 54% of the domestic consumer VR market, ranking first, while the Pico 4 Ultra was among the country’s major VR product launches that year.
Counterpoint Research data showed that Pico accounted for approximately 5% of XR headset shipments as of the first quarter of 2026. Meta continued to dominate the global VR market, while Pico remained one of the few companies outside Meta to regularly launch standalone consumer headsets.
The global XR market is now diverging into several product categories. Traditional VR headsets remain focused largely on gaming and entertainment, while MR devices are expanding into spatial computing, productivity, and enterprise applications. Smart glasses have also emerged as another growth segment.
Meanwhile, Project Swan marks Pico’s transition from its existing standalone VR lineup to a new generation of MR devices.
Li’s first major priorities as head of Pico will include launching the company’s next-generation MR headset and moving Pico OS 6 from an early developer preview toward broader deployment.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Li Zhaofeng for 36Kr.