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 said in a post on X on Thursday.
“First official visuals of Meta’s Challenge Phoenix, discovered within the HorizonOS Prescription Lens firmware bundle,” Luna wrote.
The photographs present a slim, glasses-style system 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 said in a report on UploadVR.
The system is codenamed Challenge Phoenix, however Meta has been utilizing the time period “VR Glasses” in some locations, Luna said in a post on X yesterday. Beforehand, Meta referred to it as “system” or “headset.”
Hiding in a prescription lens app
The photographs confirmed up in Meta’s HorizonOS Prescription Lens app on Wednesday, Luna said on X, then the app was pulled shortly after, according to a follow-up post.
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 gadgets.”
They’ve been reporting on Phoenix for many of a 12 months. On January 1 they posted a sketch of the system primarily based on improvement items they stated that they had seen, and quote-posted it this week.
Final month, in addition they printed a long roundup of everything known about the device.
Based on 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 much like Apple’s Imaginative and prescient Professional.
The sphere of view is narrower than on a conventional headset, at roughly 88 to 91 levels diagonally, Luna said on X.
The Wall Road Journal has reported that the value goal is below $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 wish to see a VR headset so mild and skinny that it’s principally a pair of glasses that may additionally double as common glasses or as AR and AI glasses. I already put on glasses, so this method appeals to me.
Nonetheless, if this can be a means of backing out of the entire metaverse factor with out admitting that it was a $92 billion mistake, then that doesn’t bode effectively 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 presumably, a reptile sporting a human pores and skin — having an enormous firm within the area did assist lend credence to the trade.
In the meantime, I checked the agenda of the Meta Connect 2026 convention, which begins in two weeks.
“We’ll share the newest in VR, wearables, metaverse, and AI,” Meta said in its save-the-date post.
Having VR in first place is an efficient signal. And the conference 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 may go into element concerning the new VR Glasses’ eye and hand monitoring, Luna said in the UploadVR report.
The brand new Meta VR Glasses aren’t anticipated to ship this 12 months. Meta pushed the launch again to the primary half of 2027 final December, according to Business Insider, which cited an inside memo from Maher Saba, vp of Meta’s Actuality Labs Basis. The delay was “going to offer us much more respiration room to get this proper,” Meta executives Gabriel Aul and Ryan Cairns stated in a separate memo, in response to the report.
Given all of the unhealthy information that we’ve seen about Meta’s VR tasks lately, that’s not a great signal.
In March, Meta shut down Horizon Workrooms, stopped taking new Quest for Business customers, 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 12 months on $431 million in income, according to Meta’s second quarter earnings report, on high of $4 billion in the first quarter. Add that to the $84 billion the division had lost through the end of 2025, and the working whole since 2020 is now greater than $92 billion.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has stated the corporate nonetheless has two headsets within the pipeline.
“I believe it’s formally leaked we’ve bought two gadgets on the roadmap that we’re tremendous enthusiastic about popping out over the course of a time period,” Bosworth stated in an interview at Davos earlier this 12 months.
The opposite system is Quest 4, a gaming-focused headset now anticipated in late 2027 or 2028.
In the meantime, the VR headset market as a complete is shrinking. World XR headwear shipments fell 39 % within the first half of this 12 months, to about 2 million items, and Meta’s share dropped to 48 % from 71 % a 12 months earlier, according to a September 3 report from Omdia.
“Meta poured huge sources into headsets, however has struggled to copy the breakout success of the Quest 2,” Omdia senior principal analyst George Jijiashvili stated within the report. “The continued droop throughout the headset market reinforces that cumbersome headwear stays a troublesome promote past a core fanatic base.”
Counterpoint Analysis had related numbers. VR headset shipments fell 18 % 12 months over 12 months within the second quarter, whereas AR glasses rose 138 %, according to its September 8 report, which stated Meta’s choice to lift Quest costs “added additional strain to an already cooling market.”
That’s a sharper decline than the 12 percent drop IDC forecast for 2025 after 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 12 months, up 167 % from a 12 months earlier, and IDC expects practically 14 million of them to ship in 2026 — in comparison with about 3 million combined actuality headsets, IDC client gadgets analysis director Jitesh Ubrani said in a June blog post.
Income from Ray-Ban and Oakley AI glasses practically doubled within the second quarter, EssilorLuxottica, Meta’s manufacturing associate, said in its first-half earnings release.
And Omdia’s numbers present glasses going from 10 % of all XR headwear within the first half of 2025 to 26 % within the first half of this 12 months.
“XR glasses are gaining momentum as a result of shoppers are more and more prepared to commerce some immersion for much less friction,” Omdia senior analyst Qiran Ju stated within the report. “Lighter designs and acquainted use circumstances equivalent to video viewing and gaming are decreasing the limitations to adoption.”
In the event you’re confused by the acronyms:
- AR is “augmented actuality.” The glasses are largely regular glass, and you may see the precise world via them, with small pictures or textual content overlaid on them. For instance, you would have a cartoony Pokemon hiding below 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 true, bodily world solely exhibits up in occasional pass-through moments, equivalent to glowing traces marking the sides 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 sort of mixture of the 2, and sometimes means that you’ve a VR headset with a digital camera on the entrance of it so it may “cross via” a picture of the true world and undertaking it in your glasses’ show display.
- XR is “prolonged actuality.” It’s a catch-all time period for all of those completely different sorts of glasses.
And all of those now have AI bolted on, after all.
I’ve tried many of those gadgets. I’ve purchased a number of, producers have despatched me a ton of them to demo, and I’ve tried others at tech conferences.
To date, I haven’t been impressed with any of them. For films, 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 displays and my precise Home windows laptop, keyboard, and mouse for the foreseeable future.
The brand new Meta VR Glasses, at a reported 110 grams — nearly 4 ounces — with no face cushion, tethered to a puck, with out controllers, at near $1,000, from an organization that simply spent the 12 months closing its personal VR apps, might be not the reply.
To not point out the slender discipline of view, the shortage of killer apps, and, after all, 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 era of those. Nor, most likely, 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 buyers to get into the area and provides us one thing we will truly use.
