Meta Unveils 100-Gram VR Glasses at Connect 2026, Shipping Spring 2027 for $1,300

At its annual Connect conference on 23 September 2026, Meta unveiled Meta VR Glasses, a lightweight virtual-reality headset that weighs approximately 100 grams — roughly one-fifth the weight of a Quest 3 and one-sixth that of Apple's Vision Pro. The glasses use a magnesium-alloy frame and pancake lenses, and all computing is offloaded to a separate 300-gram Compute Puck connected via an optical tether.

The puck runs Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset and packs 12 GB of RAM plus 128 GB of storage with microSD expansion. Dual micro-OLED panels deliver 2,412 × 2,288 pixels per eye at up to 120 Hz with Dolby Vision support. The horizontal field of view is 70 degrees, narrower than Quest 3's 110 degrees — a trade-off for the drastically lighter form factor. Meta says battery life reaches up to three hours of continuous media playback, with 45-watt fast charging on the puck.

By splitting optics from processing, Meta is betting that people who resisted strapping on bulky headsets will put on something closer to oversized sunglasses. The device supports full-colour video passthrough for mixed reality and claims to be the first IMAX Enhanced-certified VR product. It will ship in spring 2027 at $1,299.99 — more expensive than Quest 3 but significantly cheaper than Vision Pro's launch price.

The announcement also included third-generation Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with a nine-hour battery and the $349 Ray-Ban Meta Audio, the company's first camera-free smart glasses aimed at privacy-conscious buyers. Meta is clearly making a long-term bet that spatial computing only reaches mainstream adoption when the hardware shrinks to something people actually want to wear. Whether a tethered puck and a $1,300 price tag constitute mainstream remains to be seen.