Meta Bets Big on Wearables, Unveiling $1,299 Mixed-Reality Glasses and a Cheaper AI Eyewear Lineup

Meta used its annual Connect conference on Tuesday to lay out the widest lineup of wearable hardware in the company's history, unveiling a $1,299.99 mixed-reality headset alongside a camera-free line of smart glasses and an expanded family of Ray-Ban-branded AI eyewear. The announcements, made at Meta's Menlo Park campus, mark the company's most concentrated push yet into glasses and headsets as an alternative to the smartphone.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg used the keynote to frame the hardware as a delivery system for Muse, the personal AI agent Meta introduced earlier this month. "I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives," Zuckerberg told the audience, a line reported from the keynote that set the tone for a two-hour presentation built almost entirely around wearable devices rather than the metaverse software Meta emphasized in years past.

What was announced

The headline product, called Meta VR Glasses, is a mixed-reality headset that weighs about 100 grams, a fraction of the weight of the company's Quest 3, achieved by splitting the device into a lightweight glasses-like frame and a separate compute puck connected by a tether. According to the product page Meta published Tuesday, the headset uses a 5K micro-OLED display system, pancake lenses, a Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite chip, and roughly three hours of battery life for continuous high-resolution playback with 45-watt fast charging. It is the first device certified under the IMAX Enhanced program and supports hologram-style video calling through WhatsApp and other apps, drawing an explicit comparison to Apple's more expensive Vision Pro. Meta says the headset will ship in spring 2027.

Alongside it, Meta refreshed its Ray-Ban partnership with a third-generation Ray-Ban Meta model priced from $449 and available immediately, and introduced a camera-free line it calls Ray-Ban Meta Audio, starting at $349 and shipping October 13. A lower-cost, camera-free "Adventurer" style starts at $249. Meta said in a separate announcement covering the audio glasses and new styles that it plans to sell more than 100 glasses variants across the Ray-Ban, Oakley and Meta brands by the end of the year, including limited-edition frames tied to the musician Lisa and Kylie Jenner.

The numbers

• Meta VR Glasses: $1,299.99, shipping spring 2027, about 100 grams, roughly three hours of continuous high-resolution battery life
• Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 3): from $449, available today, 12-megapixel camera, up to nine hours of battery life
• Ray-Ban Meta Audio: from $349, camera-free, preorders open now, ships October 13, up to 12 hours of battery plus 48 hours from its case
• Meta Adventurer: from $249, the company's least expensive current model, shipping October 23
• Muse Charm, a pocket-sized AI companion device: expected in December, in time for the holidays

Meta also pushed updates to its existing Ray-Ban Display glasses, adding voice-guided cycling and transit directions in the United States and Canada, landmark-based walking directions, and an early-access hologram feature for WhatsApp calls, according to a post detailing the software update. The company said it is also opening online sales of that product in the United States immediately, with retail availability in Canada and the United Kingdom, and expansion to France, Italy and Germany on October 13.

How Meta got here

The launch caps a multibillion-dollar, multiyear retreat from the all-encompassing "metaverse" strategy Zuckerberg championed starting in 2021. Meta's Reality Labs division, which houses its headset and glasses business, posted an operating loss of $4.62 billion on $431 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2026 alone, according to the company's quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which put the division's cumulative operating losses since it began breaking out results in late 2020 at close to $90 billion. That spending has increasingly shifted away from bulky, tethered VR headsets and toward everyday-wearable glasses, a pivot Zuckerberg has attributed to AI making voice- and camera-equipped eyewear more useful than earlier virtual-reality bets.

Who is affected, and what comes next

The rollout touches several groups at once: consumers choosing among four price tiers of glasses and a headset that costs more than most laptops; Meta's manufacturing partner EssilorLuxottica, which produces the Ray-Ban and Oakley frames; developers building software for the new headset's operating system; and retailers such as Walmart, Best Buy and Instacart, which Meta said are integrating with the Muse assistant so it can complete purchases on a user's behalf. Coverage compiled from the keynote noted that Meta is betting the combination of cheaper audio-only glasses and a marquee headset will broaden its wearables audience beyond the early adopters who bought earlier Ray-Ban Meta generations.

"I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives."

Reaction from the technology press following the keynote focused on the price gap between the new headset and Meta's earlier Quest line, and on whether a tethered, puck-based design will prove more comfortable for extended use than past attempts at lightweight mixed reality. Analysts have also noted that the strategy still requires Meta to convince a mass audience to wear a camera- or microphone-equipped device on their face, a proposition that has drawn privacy criticism since the first Ray-Ban Meta glasses shipped in 2023.

The near-term test will come quickly: Ray-Ban Meta Audio ships October 13, the Adventurer model follows October 23, and the Muse Charm pendant is due before the December holidays, giving Meta three separate launch windows this year to show that demand for AI-equipped eyewear can offset the cost of building the headset meant to arrive in spring 2027.