If you had a new Quest headset on your Meta Connect bingo card, I have bad news and good news. The bad news is there is no Quest. The good news is VR hasn’t been forgotten; in fact, it’s kind of the highlight of this year’s hardware releases from the company.
Meta finally unveiled its $1,299 Meta VR Glasses, a long-rumored pair of XR glasses tethered to a compute puck. If you’re familiar with Google and Xreal’s Aura glasses, the idea is similar. The Meta VR Glasses shrink down the abilities of a Quest headset into a glasses-like form factor, allowing you to play games in XR/VR, watch movies, and use the glasses as a virtual multi-monitor setup for productivity.
Maybe the Quest isn’t the best comparison, though. This display inside the Meta VR Glasses is premium—like, Vision Pro premium. Meta says the Meta VR Glasses have a micro-OLED display with a 5K resolution and 37 pixels per degree. Having tried it myself, it looks very crisp, and that’s not the only trick it borrows from the Vision Pro. To control the Meta VR Glasses, you don’t need additional hardware—you can use your fingers to pinch to select and control the cursor using just your eyes. Like in Apple’s visionOS, you just look and pinch, and boom, you’re navigating a UI.
A nice-looking screen doesn’t mean much if you don’t have plenty of experiences, though, and on that front, Meta’s ambitions are pretty high. There’s gaming, of course; Meta says there will be 75 games at launch that you can play with just hand gestures and that you’ll be able to play the entire Quest catalog by pairing Quest controllers (yes, you can use the ones you already own). You’ll also be able to use Xbox Cloud Gaming if you want a big virtual screen to game on. I tried that experience out by playing Forza for a bit, and it was pretty crisp.
Entertainment is another major focus here, and Meta has a lot of different kinds of content lined up. There are immersive sports from the NBA and MLB. There are 3D movies, too; Meta is partnering with Disney to port movies like Marvel’s The Avengers and Marvel Studios’ Black Panther into 3D in “select countries.” It’s also offering “themed immersive viewing environments,” which make it look like you’re watching from Tatooine or Avengers Tower.
Meta is partnering with plenty of third-party streaming apps, too, including Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, DirecTV, AMC+, Crunchyroll, Plex, and Tubi, so you’ll be able to watch 2D videos as well. Notably, Meta says that Peacock, HBO Max, and Paramount+ are also including the 3D media catalogs for the first time ever on a VR service.
If work is your thing, you’ll also be able to use the Meta VR Glasses as a multi-monitor setup. You can connect to your laptop wirelessly or plug the glasses into any laptop or device that supports DisplayPort. Work is a little less exciting than games and entertainment, but I guess it could be useful if you need a big monitor while you’re away from home.
In that vein, Meta says it’s offering a Vision Pro-like Persona experience for video calling. Using the Meta VR Glasses, you’ll be able to create a digital avatar of yourself that you can use in apps like WhatsApp or Zoom. Other people’s holograms will appear in front of you when you’re on a call, apparently. I wasn’t able to try this experience for myself, but it sounds… interesting.
Battery life is surprisingly okay, according to Meta. It says you’ll get three hours of life with high-res media playback, putting it on par with the Vision Pro or Quest. For people who need prescription lenses, Meta says they won’t be able to wear glasses underneath, but the Meta VR Glasses will be compatible with RX inserts for $100 a pop.
We still have a while to go before the Meta VR Glasses are released to the world—Meta is saying they’ll release spring 2027. But the early results look pretty exciting. Sure. $1,299 ain’t cheap, but if cramming the experience of a Quest down into a pair of glasses excites you, this could be the gadget you’ve been waiting for.
