Meta used its annual Connect conference here Wednesday to unveil a new lightweight virtual-reality headset and a palm-sized AI companion device, the clearest signal yet that Mark Zuckerberg is steering the company's hardware ambitions away from bulky headsets and toward gadgets people might actually wear or carry all day.
The centerpiece is a pair of VR glasses priced at $1,299 and weighing about 100 grams — roughly the heft of a pair of sunglasses and a fraction of the weight of Meta's own Quest 3 headset. The glasses are due to ship in spring 2027 and are Meta's first new high-end VR hardware since 2024. "We've also heard that a lot of people are less interested in wearing a headset, so we've built a new kind of VR device," Zuckerberg told the audience.
Alongside the glasses, Meta introduced Muse Charm, a keychain-sized device built around the company's Muse AI assistant that lets people talk to an AI agent without pulling out a phone, computer or headset. The gadget, expected to reach early customers this holiday season, is designed for real-time voice conversation and is meant to work as a standalone companion rather than an accessory tied to a bigger device.
Meta also refreshed its Ray-Ban smart glasses lineup, adding camera-equipped styles alongside audio-only versions in Clubmaster and Burbank frames, and showed off a new Meta Display model with a small screen built into one lens.
Pricing itself against Apple
The $1,299 price tag positions Meta's new glasses squarely below Apple's Vision Pro, which sells for roughly $3,700 and has drawn criticism for its bulk and limited consumer traction since launch. Meta has not released a rival mixed-reality headset at that price point before, and executives used Wednesday's event to argue that lighter, cheaper hardware paired with an increasingly capable AI agent is a more realistic path to mainstream adoption than Apple's spatial-computing pitch has been.
Zuckerberg framed the broader hardware push in more sweeping terms, telling the Connect audience that "delivering personal superintelligence is now within reach" — language the company has increasingly used to describe its ambitions for Muse as a persistent, always-available AI agent rather than a one-off chatbot feature.
The event, held at Meta's Menlo Park headquarters, included onstage demonstrations with YouTuber Casey Neistat and NBA forward Draymond Green, part of a broader effort by Meta to showcase everyday, non-technical uses for the new devices rather than the enterprise and gaming demos that have dominated past Connect keynotes.
Whether the strategy pays off will depend on how consumers respond to yet another wearable category after mixed results for VR headsets generally. Meta has staked a considerable amount of capital on AI-linked hardware over the past two years, and the spring 2027 shipping date for the glasses gives the company several more months to build developer and content support before the product reaches buyers.
