Meta's VR Glasses Ship in Spring 2027 at $1,300, 100 Grams
Hardware / analysis
Meta's VR Glasses Ship in Spring 2027 at $1,300, 100 Grams
The headset offloads its battery and Snapdragon Reality Elite chip to a tethered puck, and ships without controllers included by default.
Meta's new VR Glasses will cost $1,299.99 and ship in spring 2027, the company said at its Sept. 23, 2026 Connect keynote. The headset weighs about 100 grams, which Meta says is five times lighter than its 515-gram Meta Quest 3, achieved by moving the battery, chip and storage into a separate tethered puck.
Meta announced the glasses in a recap posted to its own blog. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg described the split design at the keynote: "The VR Glasses handle the sensors and display, while the puck, connected by an optical tether, handles compute, battery, and storage, and conveniently clips to your pocket or bag," according to Social Media Today's account of the event.
The puck carries a Snapdragon Reality Elite chip, 12GB of RAM and 128GB of storage
The glasses' frame holds dual 2.4K micro-OLED displays running at 120Hz, with a resolution of 2,412 by 2,288 pixels per eye and a 70-degree horizontal by 66-degree vertical field of view, according to UploadVR's report on the announcement. All of the processing lives in the puck instead of the frame: a Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset, 12GB of RAM and 128GB of storage with a microSD expansion slot, linked to the glasses by what Meta calls a hybrid fiber-optic cable.
The tradeoff for that split is battery life. Meta's puck design supports up to three hours of continuous playback, according to Engadget's report on the keynote, short enough that the glasses read as a session device rather than an all-day wearable, closer to how a game console gets used than a phone.
| Spec | Meta VR Glasses | Meta Quest 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Weight | ~100 g (headset only) | 515 g |
| Field of view | 70° × 66° | 110° × 96° |
| Price | $1,299.99 | $599.99 |
No controllers by default, hand and eye tracking instead
The VR Glasses do not include controllers in the base package. Buyers can add Touch Plus controllers, sold separately in a new black color, or pair controllers they already own from a Quest 3 or Quest 3S, according to UploadVR. In place of controllers, the headset tracks hands, eyes and faces with four cameras each, and Meta is pitching a mode that turns a table or desk into a keyboard and touchpad using surface input.
Meta says the glasses will launch with 75 games, run the same operating system as Quest 3, and support the existing Quest 3 app library, plus compatibility with Xbox Cloud Gaming, according to Engadget. Meta's own Beat Saber studio is shipping what it calls its biggest update in close to a decade alongside the launch, a hand-tracked mode called Flux, timed to the same spring 2027 window as the hardware.
The narrower field of view trades periphery for passthrough
A 70-by-66-degree field of view is narrower than the roughly 110-by-96-degree field Quest 3 offers, according to UploadVR's comparison of the two devices. Meta is betting that trade works in the glasses' favor specifically in passthrough mixed reality, where a natural view of the outside world at the edge of vision is often preferable to darkness, rather than in the fully immersive games a narrower field of view would normally penalize.
That bet only pays off if developers build for passthrough rather than full immersion, and Meta has not said what share of the 75 launch games use it. The number that matters is not the field of view on its own, but how many of those games ship a passthrough mode instead of the fully enclosed one Quest 3 defaults to.
Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 and a $349 audio-only pair ship first
Meta used the same keynote to announce Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 smart glasses, starting at $449 with a 12-megapixel camera, 3K video capture and 9 hours of battery life, up from 8 hours on the prior generation, according to Engadget. A separate camera-free model, Ray-Ban Meta Audio, starts at $349, weighs 43 grams and opens preorders immediately for an Oct. 13, 2026 ship date, roughly five months ahead of the VR Glasses.
Meta said it will offer more than 100 style and color combinations across its AI glasses line by the end of 2026 and is expanding sales to Singapore, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, according to its own Connect recap.
Meta has not disclosed a battery capacity figure for the puck itself, only the three-hour playback ceiling, and has not said whether that figure assumes the display running at full 120Hz or a lower-power mode. Snap prices its own AR glasses at nearly three times what Meta charges for a comparable pair, a sign of how differently two companies are pricing the same bet on lightweight, display-equipped hardware. Whether the puck design holds up against Qualcomm's own benchmark claims for its chips, which have gone unverified before, is the variable that decides whether Meta's weight savings were worth the three-hour battery tradeoff.
Sources
- Everything We Announced at Meta Connect 2026 — Meta
- Meta VR Glasses Officially Announced, Shipping Spring 2027 For $1300 — UploadVR
- Everything announced at Meta Connect 2026, Engadget
- Meta outlines Muse, AI glasses and VR device updates at Connect 2026, Social Media Today
- Meta Quest 3 weight - how heavy is it?, PC Guide
Sources
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