Meta Unveils 100-Gram VR Glasses With a Tethered Compute Puck

Meta used its Connect 2026 keynote to officially unveil Meta VR Glasses, a headset that weighs just 100 grams — roughly five times lighter than the Meta Quest 3 — by moving nearly all of the computing hardware into a separate, pocket-sized puck connected by a tether.

The glasses themselves house 2.4K micro-OLED displays, pancake lenses, and eye tracking inside a magnesium-alloy frame, while the puck carries the processing, storage, and battery. That puck runs on Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset, paired with 12GB of RAM and 128GB of storage that can be expanded via a microSD slot.

Meta VR Glasses are priced at $1,299.99 and are set to ship in the U.S. in spring 2027. By offloading compute to a wired accessory, Meta is betting that a genuinely lightweight, glasses-shaped form factor — rather than a bulkier standalone headset — is what finally makes all-day VR and mixed reality wear practical.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons, © Siarhei Besarab, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.