Wednesday, 28 August, 2024 UTC


Summary

Meta plans to ship an extremely light mixed reality headset in 2027, The Information reports.
The Information's new report comes less than a week after it reported that Mark Zuckerberg and his CTO Andrew Bosworth canceled a high-end headset planned for 2027 codenamed La Jolla, which previous reports have described as being a Quest Pro 2.
Quest Pro 2 Reportedly Canceled By Meta
Meta has reportedly canceled the high-end headset it planned for 2027 due to the high cost of its micro-OLED displays.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
According to the new report, at the same product roadmap review meeting where Zuckerberg and Bosworth canceled La Jolla they greenlit a very different headset codenamed Puffin, with the same target year of 2027.
Puffin reportedly resembles "a bulky pair of glasses" and weighs less than 110 grams, yet is an opaque VR-style headset with pancake lenses and passthrough cameras. Its remarkably light weight is apparently being achieved by offloading both the battery and computing hardware to an external tethered puck, which Meta "hopes" will be small enough to fit in the user's pocket.
If the report is accurate, Puffin will be significantly lighter than any other shipping fully functional VR headset to date. For comparison, Meta Quest 3 weighs around 400 grams without its straps and facial interface and around 515 grams with them. Of this weight, the battery is around 70 grams.
The report describes Puffin as not including controllers, instead using the gaze-and-pinch input scheme introduced by Apple Vision Pro. Given The Information has also reported Meta plans two Quest 4 models for 2026, this strongly suggests Puffin will be a completely new product line, perhaps focused on media and productivity use cases, directly competing with Apple Vision headsets at a much lower price.