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Yesterday evening was the Meta Connect event, where the company unveiled several glasses and wearables. One of the more notable announcements was the Meta VR Glasses, a direct competitor to Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which are due out sometime next spring.
So what’s to know about them other than being cheaper than Apple’s VR headset? Plenty. The VR glasses appear to be mildly larger sunglasses, as opposed to being a larger headset, which encapsulates most of your face. It’s made of a magnesium alloy and weighs only 100 grams, which is 5x lighter than the Meta Quest 3 VR headset. The company pulled this off by placing all of its computing and battery components on a separate, tethered puck, rather than on the headset itself.
Oh, and did we mention they’re customizable? Yeah, that too. The glasses will arrive in two sizes, standard and large, with options for small, medium, and large nosepads, and the option to add prescription lenses courtesy of Zenni eyewear.
Behind the glasses are a pair of 5K micro-OLED custom lenses capable of ‘cinema-grade clarity,’ according to Meta. They’ll also support Dolby Atmos spatial audio, Dolby Vision, and IMAX Enhanced content. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Reality Elite XR2 Gen 3 chip, 12GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage expandable up to 1TB via microSD. The glasses are also capable of three hours of continuous high-resolution media playback on a single charge and supports 45W fast charging via USB-C, which offers a 50% charge in 35 minutes.
Meta’s VR glasses will offer over 75 games at launch, including new games that support hand-tracking. This is in addition to the full Quest library of games with Meta’s Touch Controllers and games via Xbox Cloud Gaming with a Bluetooth controller. The company also includes its new Muse AI and the ability to craft a hologram of yourself for Zoom and other virtual scenarios.
Meta also revealed the $350 Ray-Ban Meta Audio smart glasses, which focus on what the name suggests: audio. Essentially, they’re the audio-only version of the Meta glasses and are arriving on October 13. The company also unveiled the next-gen $450 Ray-Ban Meta (gen 3) smart glasses, which are available now and offer a slimmer design, longer battery life, and a dedicated button to activate Meta AI.
For those of you interested, you can watch the entire Meta Connect video below.
