(VIDEO) Meta Launches $1,299 VR Glasses, Sharply Undercutting Apple’s Vision Pro on Both Price and Weight

Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a new $1,299 virtual reality headset Wednesday that undercuts Apple’s Vision Pro on both price and size, marking a significant shift in headset design that the company says puts its Reality Labs division on track toward profitability.

The device, called Meta VR Glasses, was revealed by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg during the company’s annual Meta Connect developer conference at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. It represents a fundamentally different approach to headset engineering compared with Meta’s earlier Quest-branded devices and Apple’s own Vision Pro. Rather than housing the processor, battery, cooling fan and other computing components inside the headset itself, as Meta’s previous models have done, the new device shifts nearly all of that hardware into an external pack that can clip to a user’s pocket or sit on a nearby table, connected to the glasses by a cable.

That redesign dramatically reduces the weight users must wear on their face. According to reporting on the device, Meta VR Glasses weigh approximately 100 grams, roughly one-sixth the weight of Apple’s Vision Pro and about one-fifth the weight of Meta’s own Quest 3S headset. Apple’s Vision Pro, by comparison, moves only its battery to an external pack while keeping its processor and other core computing components inside the headset itself.

Zuckerberg framed the device as a breakthrough in delivering immersive computing in a genuinely wearable form factor. “We have built a new kind of VR device that delivers the same magical feeling of presence and immersion, high-resolution displays and views of the world around you in a form factor that is a pair of glasses for the first time,” Zuckerberg said on stage at the conference.

The glasses feature a 5K micro-OLED display and are equipped with sensors that track users’ eye and hand movements, reducing the need for separate handheld controllers to interact with the device, according to details shared at the event. Because users view the surrounding world through two screens rather than direct optical passthrough, the glasses include external cameras that capture and display the wearer’s physical surroundings in real time. The device supports up to three hours of playback on its external battery pack and offers many of the same core capabilities as Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s existing Quest lineup, including immersive video playback, office productivity apps, the ability to function as an external monitor for a Mac or PC, and web browsing.

Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth acknowledged in an interview that the company’s shift toward an external computing architecture owes something to the trail Apple blazed with the Vision Pro’s own partial external-pack design. Bosworth said Meta owes Apple “a little bit of a debt of gratitude,” crediting the Vision Pro with helping generate broader entertainment industry enthusiasm for immersive computing and with giving the industry, in his words, “permission to explore split architectures,” a dynamic he said helped inform Meta’s approach to the new glasses.

During an extended hands-on demonstration that included watching immersive highlights from an NBA game, navigating Meta’s redesigned headset operating system, and working on a connected PC, the lighter design reportedly made the device notably more comfortable to wear for extended periods compared with bulkier prior-generation headsets.

Meta VR Glasses are scheduled to go on sale in spring 2027, marking the company’s first new VR headset release since the $299 Quest 3S debuted in 2024. The $1,299 price positions the new glasses well below the Vision Pro’s price point while still representing Meta’s most expensive VR device to date, a pricing strategy the company has said is designed to ensure the product does not sell at a per-unit loss, supporting its broader goal of pushing the Reality Labs division toward sustained profitability.

Meta VR Glasses were not the only wearable device unveiled at Wednesday’s event. The company also introduced the Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses, a camera-free version of its existing smart glasses line priced at $349, along with the third generation of its standard Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Zuckerberg additionally revealed the Muse Charm, a handheld accessory device designed to work alongside Meta’s recently released Muse artificial intelligence personal agent.

Meta enters this next phase of the smart glasses and VR market from a position of considerable strength. According to data from the International Data Corporation, Meta accounted for 68.7% of global smart glasses shipments during the second quarter of 2026, making it the clear market leader heading into an increasingly competitive stretch. Rivals Samsung and Google are both preparing to launch their own competing smart glasses later this fall, with designs from eyewear brands Warby Parker and Gentle Monster built on Google’s Android XR platform, developed jointly with Samsung and Qualcomm. Snap Inc. is separately rolling out its own Specs AR glasses, adding a further competitor to the increasingly crowded field of companies racing to bring wearable augmented and virtual reality devices to a broader consumer audience.

With Meta VR Glasses not set to reach consumers until spring 2027, the device’s ultimate commercial success remains untested, but its combination of a substantially lower price point and dramatically reduced weight relative to Apple’s Vision Pro sets up a direct point of comparison between the two companies’ competing visions for how immersive computing hardware should be designed, as both companies continue working to build broader mainstream demand for a product category that has so far struggled to move meaningfully beyond early adopters and niche professional use cases.