Meta VR Glasses were just officially announced. Priced at $1300, they have micro-OLED displays, weigh 100 grams, and are powered by a tethered puck with Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset.The puck runs the same operating system as Quest 3, and supports all the same content, rendered at notably higher resolution thanks to a combination of the more powerful chipset (essentially an XR2 Gen 3 by a different name) and eye-tracked foveated rendering. The only caveat to that is that Meta VR Glasses do not come with controllers by default, but you can buy Touch Plus controllers optionally, or pair the controllers from your existing Quest 3 or Quest 3S, and there'll be a bundle with controllers "in some retail channels".Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon Reality Elite, Its New Flagship XR ChipsetQualcomm just announced Snapdragon Reality Elite, its new flagship XR chipset, and it will debut in the compute puck of Xreal’s Aura Android XR device this fall.UploadVRDavid HeaneyThe stark difference between Meta VR Glasses and any Quest to date, however, is the form factor and weight.Meta VR Glasses have no onboard computing, not even a tracking coprocessor, and thus entirely rely on the puck, which provides both power and data over a flexible and light fiber optic cable.The visor has an open-periphery design, where you naturally see the real world to your sides and below you, and a magnesium alloy frame that minimizes weight and enables the fanless passively cooled design that weighs "around" 100 grams. 0:00 /1:10 1× Meta VR Glasses introduction trailer. Another key difference is the display and field of view. With dual 120Hz 2412×2288 micro-OLED displays, Meta VR Glasses has the highest resolution of any Meta headset to date, and is the company's first non-LCD headset since the original Oculus Quest.The form factor brings a major compromise, though: the field of view. Meta advertises 70° horizontal × 66° vertical (87° diagonal) compared to the roughly 110° horizontal × 96° vertical of Quest 3. Meta VR Glasses Quest 3 Steam Frame Display Type Micro-OLED LCD LCD Pixels Per Eye 2412×2288 2064×2208 2160×2160 Field of View 70° × 66° 110° × 96° 110° × 110° AngularResolution 37 PPD 25 PPD ~25 PPD Chipset SnapdragonReality Elite SnapdragonXR2 Gen 2 Snapdragon8 Gen 3 RAM 12GB 8GB 16GB Passthrough Color26 PPD Color18 PPD MonochromeLow-res Hand Tracking ✅ ✅ ❌ Eye Tracking ✅(4-camera) ❌ ✅(2-camera) Face Tracking ✅ ❌ ❌ Price & Storage $1300(128GB) $600(512GB) $1059(256GB) MicroSD Slot ✅ ❌ ✅ The lower field of view will make Meta VR Glasses feel far less immersive than a Quest headset when the optional light blockers are attached. But, somewhat ironically given the name of the product, Meta VR Glasses should shine without the light blockers in passthrough, where you get a natural view of your periphery.Meta plans to market the product as "a cinema, a courtside seat, and a workspace in one device that fits in your bag".Essentially, Meta VR Glasses at its core is the same product proposition as the Xreal Aura Android XR glasses but with a VR-style passthrough display system that offers a larger field of view (87° diagonal vs 70°), higher resolution, and full opacity, alongside the inclusion of eye tracking and optional tracked controllers. We do not yet, however, know the price of Xreal Aura. 0:00 /0:12 1× Meta VR Glasses To expand the library of content available to all Meta VR Glasses buyers, Meta announced a swathe of new hand tracking VR and mixed reality games, including a new hand-tracked Beat Saber mode called Flux.Meta VR Glasses will also feature the first implementation of Hologram, the company's productization of its Codec Avatars research. Similar to Apple Vision Pro's Personas, it will let you join flatscreen WhatsApp video calls as a photorealistic face-tracked avatar, and appear as a realistic full-scale avatar for other Meta VR Glasses (and eventually Quest 3) owners.However, at launch, your spatial Hologram will be a "2.5D" stereoscopic video stream, at true scale but only as a front-angle view. Meta says it plans to evolve Hologram over time to become a truly 6DoF 3D system, at which point it will become the default platform-level avatar experience for its VR platform, effectively superseding the cartoon Meta Avatars.