Meta Revolutionizes the VR Headset

Two kinds of device are racing toward each other: smart glasses and VR headsets.In a VR headset, you are immersed in a virtual environment where you can work on screens of custom sizes, watch movies on an enormous cinema screen, or play three-dimensional games. But headsets are heavy, bulky, and meant to be worn mostly indoors. Wearing one doesn’t just put a different world in front of you; it can shut out the one around you.Smart glasses solve the bulk problem. They are glasses with thicker arms to hold batteries, speakers, microphones, cameras, and chips. Most don’t have screens — their lenses are like those on normal glasses — and those that do often show a small window in part of your vision, such as the Meta Ray-Ban Display. Snap’s SPECS go further, putting full-color, three-dimensional digital objects over a view of the real world — but they’re still not going to be as good as VR.For the longest time, it was obvious that the two would come together: a single category with the size, lightness, comfort, convenience, and openness to the outside world of smart glasses, but the potential for immersion and large screens of VR headsets. Now that’s starting to happen.Courtesy of MetaSnap has made a chunkier pair of smart glasses with a far more sophisticated see-through display. But Meta has seemingly just completely upstaged them with its VR Glasses: a headset that brings much of its bulkier Quest line into a form factor far slimmer and lighter than a Quest. Snap’s SPECS are due to ship this fall from $2,195; Meta says its VR Glasses will arrive in spring 2027 for $1,299.99. They serve different purposes — Snap overlays the world, while Meta can replace most of what you see — but the comparison is hard to avoid.The trick is that Meta has taken an idea from Apple’s chunky, forgotten Vision Pro, which puts the battery in an external pack connected by a cable, and gone further. Meta has moved the processors and storage out of the glasses, too, into a puck connected by an optical tether. That leaves about 100 grams on your face. And, like the Vision Pro, most of the controls are now done through small gestures and eye tracking: you just look at what you want and use a hand gesture to select it. It also supports eye-tracked foveated rendering, which concentrates detail where you are looking to save processing power without any perceived reduction in quality.The glasses contain Meta’s 5K Infinite Display, built from micro-OLED panels and compact pancake lenses, along with speakers, sensors, and eye tracking. The Quest 3 also uses pancake lenses, while the Quest 3S uses Fresnel lenses. Meta VR Glasses deliver 37 pixels per degree, compared with 25 on Quest 3 and 20 on Quest 3S, but their reported 70-degree horizontal field of view is narrower than Quest 3’s 110 degrees and Quest 3S’s 96 degrees. It’s also worth noting that, though these somewhat resemble glasses, you don’t see through them. Cameras provide a full-color view of your surroundings, and the open sides leave you aware of the room even while virtual content fills the display.Instead, Meta has leaned into immersive entertainment, advertising the first IMAX Enhanced certification for a VR device, three-dimensional films through Disney+ and other services, and more than 100 immersive American sporting events a year after launch. It says more than 75 games will work with hand controls at launch, you can buy Touch Plus controllers separately for games that need them, and stream other games through Xbox Cloud Gaming.The productivity pitch is ambitious, too. You can set up several virtual screens, connect a Mac, Windows computer, or console as an external display, and turn a flat surface into a keyboard and touchpad. In the puck, you get Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Reality Elite processor and a battery that Meta rates for up to three hours of high-resolution video playback. And the most compelling bit is the price: $1,299.99. That’s not cheap, but if you can use them as a monitor, an in-flight cinema screen, a portable gaming console, and a video-calling tool, then they might just be worth it. The next step will be making them even lighter and smaller so you can wear them out in the world.

Meta Revolutionizes the VR Headset

Meta Revolutionizes the VR Headset

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