Meta, the corporate that has misplaced greater than $92 billion on digital actuality since 2020, has had the primary clear pictures of its subsequent headset leak out of its personal software program, lower than two weeks earlier than its annual Join convention, VR researcher Luna mentioned in a submit on X on Thursday.
“First official visuals of Meta’s Undertaking Phoenix, discovered within the HorizonOS Prescription Lens firmware package deal,” Luna wrote.
The pictures present a slim, glasses-style gadget with nostril pads as an alternative of a face cushion, sensors on the edges and undersides of the temples, and a cable working out of the left temple to a separate compute puck, Luna mentioned in a report on UploadVR.
The gadget is codenamed Undertaking Phoenix, however Meta has been utilizing the time period “VR Glasses” in some locations, Luna mentioned in a submit on X yesterday. Beforehand, Meta referred to it as “gadget” or “headset.”
Hiding in a prescription lens app
The pictures confirmed up in Meta’s HorizonOS Prescription Lens app on Wednesday, Luna mentioned on X, then the app was pulled shortly after, in response to a follow-up submit.
Luna, who goes by the deal with @Lunayian on X, is a tech contributor at UploadVR, the place their bio describes them as “a VR fanatic and dataminer primarily specializing in insights associated to the working system powering Meta Quest units.”
They’ve been reporting on Phoenix for many of a yr. On January 1 they posted a sketch of the gadget based mostly on improvement items they mentioned they’d seen, and quote-posted it this week.
Final month, additionally they revealed a protracted roundup of every thing recognized in regards to the gadget.
In line with Luna, Phoenix is Meta’s premium, ultralight headset, and it’s the successor to the Quest Professional. As an alternative of packing the battery and processor into the headset, Phoenix strikes each right into a puck that clips to the wearer’s waistband. The headset is designed for use seated, with out controllers, utilizing eye monitoring and hand monitoring in a gaze-and-pinch scheme just like Apple’s Imaginative and prescient Professional.
The sector of view is narrower than on a conventional headset, at roughly 88 to 91 levels diagonally, Luna mentioned on X.
The Wall Avenue Journal has reported that the worth goal is underneath $1,000.
So does this imply that Meta continues to be bullish on VR? Or that it’s within the strategy of shifting what’s left of its VR portfolio a bit nearer to its AI and AR-focused glasses line?
Personally, I’m torn. On the one hand, I do need to see a VR headset so gentle and skinny that it’s mainly a pair of glasses that may additionally double as common glasses or as AR and AI glasses. I already put on glasses, so this strategy appeals to me.
Nevertheless, if this can be a manner of backing out of the entire metaverse factor with out admitting that it was a $92 billion mistake, then that doesn’t bode properly for the way forward for the metaverse. No matter what I take into consideration Meta as an organization, and Mark Zuckerberg as a human — or probably, a reptile carrying a human pores and skin — having a giant firm within the area did assist lend credence to the business.
In the meantime, I checked the agenda of the Meta Join 2026 convention, which begins in two weeks.
“We’ll share the newest in VR, wearables, metaverse, and AI,” Meta mentioned in its save-the-date submit.
Having VR in first place is an effective signal. And the convention agenda, which is break up into 4 tracks, has VR as the primary monitor listed, forward of AI glasses, AI, and Horizon.
The VR monitor has 5 developer classes, in response to the agenda: a information to constructing for each Meta VR and AI glasses, updates to the sport engine SDKs, constructing Android apps for VR, constructing immersive experiences with WebXR, and “A sensible information to controller-free interplay.”
That final one is the place Meta might go into element in regards to the new VR Glasses’ eye and hand monitoring, Luna mentioned within the UploadVR report.
The brand new Meta VR Glasses aren’t anticipated to ship this yr. Meta pushed the launch again to the primary half of 2027 final December, in response to Enterprise Insider, which cited an inner memo from Maher Saba, vp of Meta’s Actuality Labs Basis. The delay was “going to provide us much more respiratory room to get this proper,” Meta executives Gabriel Aul and Ryan Cairns mentioned in a separate memo, in response to the report.
Given all of the dangerous information that we’ve seen about Meta’s VR initiatives lately, that’s not a superb signal.
In March, Meta shut down Horizon Workrooms, stopped taking new Quest for Enterprise clients, and closed three of its first-party VR studios, and introduced it was pulling the VR model of Horizon Worlds earlier than partially reversing course a number of days later.
Meta’s Actuality Labs misplaced $4.6 billion within the second quarter of this yr on $431 million in income, in response to Meta’s second quarter earnings report, on prime of $4 billion within the first quarter. Add that to the $84 billion the division had misplaced via the tip of 2025, and the working whole since 2020 is now greater than $92 billion.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has mentioned the corporate nonetheless has two headsets within the pipeline.
“I believe it’s formally leaked we’ve obtained two units on the roadmap that we’re tremendous enthusiastic about popping out over the course of a time period,” Bosworth mentioned in an interview at Davos earlier this yr.
The opposite gadget is Quest 4, a gaming-focused headset now anticipated in late 2027 or 2028.
In the meantime, the VR headset market as an entire is shrinking. World XR headwear shipments fell 39 p.c within the first half of this yr, to about 2 million items, and Meta’s share dropped to 48 p.c from 71 p.c a yr earlier, in response to a September 3 report from Omdia.
“Meta poured huge sources into headsets, however has struggled to duplicate the breakout success of the Quest 2,” Omdia senior principal analyst George Jijiashvili mentioned within the report. “The continued droop throughout the headset market reinforces that cumbersome headwear stays a tricky promote past a core fanatic base.”
Counterpoint Analysis had related numbers. VR headset shipments fell 18 p.c yr over yr within the second quarter, whereas AR glasses rose 138 p.c, in response to its September 8 report, which mentioned Meta’s resolution to boost Quest costs “added additional strain to an already cooling market.”
That’s a sharper decline than the 12 p.c drop IDC forecast for 2025 once I final checked in on the numbers.
In the meantime, AR and AI glasses are flying off the cabinets.
Show-less good glasses shipped greater than 2 million items within the first quarter of this yr, up 167 p.c from a yr earlier, and IDC expects practically 14 million of them to ship in 2026 — in comparison with about 3 million combined actuality headsets, IDC client units analysis director Jitesh Ubrani mentioned in a June weblog submit.
Income from Ray-Ban and Oakley AI glasses practically doubled within the second quarter, EssilorLuxottica, Meta’s manufacturing accomplice, mentioned in its first-half earnings launch.
And Omdia’s numbers present glasses going from 10 p.c of all XR headwear within the first half of 2025 to 26 p.c within the first half of this yr.
“XR glasses are gaining momentum as a result of customers are more and more prepared to commerce some immersion for much less friction,” Omdia senior analyst Qiran Ju mentioned within the report. “Lighter designs and acquainted use circumstances equivalent to video viewing and gaming are decreasing the obstacles to adoption.”
If you happen to’re confused by the acronyms:
AR is “augmented actuality.” The glasses are principally regular glass, and you may see the precise world via them, with small pictures or textual content overlaid on them. For instance, you could possibly have a cartoony Pokemon hiding underneath your precise desk, or navigation arrows exhibiting you the place to stroll, or subtitles translating somebody’s spoken phrases in actual time.
VR is “digital actuality.” You don’t see a lot of the true world, if in any respect, however are as an alternative immersed in a digital world. The actual, bodily world solely reveals up in occasional pass-through moments, equivalent to glowing strains marking the perimeters of your furnishings so that you don’t stroll into the espresso desk or knock over the TV.
MR is “combined actuality.” That’s some form of mixture of the 2, and sometimes means that you’ve a VR headset with a digicam on the entrance of it so it could actually “cross via” a picture of the true world and challenge it in your glasses’ show display.
XR is “prolonged actuality.” It’s a catch-all time period for all of those totally different sorts of glasses.
And all of those now have AI bolted on, in fact.
I’ve tried many of those units. I’ve purchased a number of, producers have despatched me a ton of them to demo, and I’ve tried others at tech conferences.
Thus far, I haven’t been impressed with any of them. For motion pictures, I already personal a TV set. I don’t play video games. And the glasses are just about ineffective for any actual work, so I’m sticking with my two large screens and my precise Home windows laptop, keyboard, and mouse for the foreseeable future.
The brand new Meta VR Glasses, at a reported 110 grams — virtually 4 ounces — with no face cushion, tethered to a puck, with out controllers, at near $1,000, from an organization that simply spent the yr closing its personal VR apps, might be not the reply.
To not point out the slim discipline of view, the dearth of killer apps, and, in fact, the truth that it’s tied to a closed, proprietary platform with a problematic monitor document on security. I’m not going to be shelling out my cash for the primary technology of those. Nor, in all probability, the second or third. But when they’ll present {that a} market exists for this manner issue, that may be fairly encouraging and may encourage different builders and traders to get into the area and provides us one thing we are able to truly use.
