Meta unveiled a new tier of consumer hardware at its annual Connect conference in Menlo Park, California, on Tuesday, anchored by a $1,299 pair of mixed-reality glasses and a palm-sized voice companion called the Muse Charm. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg used the keynote to argue that AI agents, not phone screens, will soon become the default way people get things done — and that Meta's hardware lineup needs to be built around talking to one.
The Meta VR Glasses, which ship in spring 2027, are noticeably lighter than the company's existing Quest headsets, weighing roughly 100 grams on the head and tethering to an external compute puck rather than running everything on-board. They use micro-OLED panels at 5.5 megapixels per eye, a 70-degree horizontal field of view and a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite chip. Battery life tops out around three hours. Reviewers who tried the device at the event described its color passthrough — the live camera feed of the real world blended with digital overlays — as the best they had seen on a standalone headset, though the field of view is narrower than the $299 Quest 3S that remains in Meta's lineup.
The Muse Charm, by contrast, is a stripped-down device: a silver, square pendant with a small front-facing touchscreen, no camera and a single top-mounted microphone, meant to be worn on a wrist strap. Meta has not set a price, saying it still needs to finalize the device's components, but plans to ship it in time for the December holidays.
Betting on agents over screens
Both devices are built to talk to Muse, Meta's personal AI agent, which the company has been expanding since its release earlier this year. At Connect, Meta demonstrated Muse handling tasks such as drafting and sending email, booking travel and completing purchases — using Stripe's Link system to generate single-use card numbers rather than storing full payment details. The company said agent activity runs inside an isolated "Secure VM" environment, with a monitoring layer called Sentinel meant to flag any data request that falls outside a task's stated permissions.
"So, if you're not wearing glasses, this is going to be by far the fastest way to talk to your Muse and to show it what's going on around you."
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO
The pitch positions the Charm as a low-friction alternative to Meta's camera-equipped Ray-Ban smart glasses, which the company also refreshed at Connect with a third-generation model, alongside a cheaper, camera-free audio-only version. Executives framed the camera-free design as a direct response to the privacy criticism that has followed Meta's glasses since the original Ray-Ban Meta debuted in 2023, when critics warned the devices made it too easy to record people without their knowledge.
A costly bet after years of losses
The hardware push comes from a division, Reality Labs, that has accumulated tens of billions of dollars in losses since Meta pivoted toward the metaverse in 2021. The $1,299 price tag is roughly four times that of the Quest 3S and undercuts Apple's $3,499 Vision Pro, positioning the glasses as a mid-tier option between mainstream VR and premium mixed reality. Meta's stock has climbed in recent sessions on investor enthusiasm for its AI agent strategy, with the Nasdaq closing at a record high this week partly on the back of the announcements.
Analysts remain split on whether consumers are ready to pay four figures for a headset built around an AI assistant rather than gaming or entertainment, and on whether a screen-free pendant can succeed where earlier wearable-AI devices, including several camera-based pins and clips from smaller startups, largely flopped. Meta has not disclosed pre-order figures for the VR Glasses or said how it will price the Muse Charm once components are finalized. Both devices are expected to face early competition from Google, Samsung and Apple, all of which have signaled plans for their own AI-native wearables over the next year.
