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Meta wires its Muse assistant into every headset and pair of glasses at Connect
Meta put its Muse assistant on every pair of glasses and headset it showed at Connect, led by $1,300 VR Glasses due this spring. For a team buyer the lineup is separate devices for separate jobs. The evidence on how people use Meta's hardware is still thin.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Meta also announced Audio Glasses, a version of its smart glasses that has no camera.
- The VR Glasses are the device previously codenamed Phoenix, lightweight VR and MR glasses Meta built to compete with the Vision Pro.
- Muse Charm, a small Tamagotchi-like device for talking to Muse, was the one announcement Meta kept from leaking.
- Version 207 of the Meta SDK lets developers build for the VR Glasses now, using simulators and emulators if they do not have the hardware.
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Why it matters
- capability Someone who wants Muse on their face without a camera now has a Meta option, so a team can settle the camera question separately from the assistant question.
- decision Teams using Meta's coding models must pick between a cheap tier that trains on their data and an expensive one that does not. Keeping their data out of training costs more.
- cost A team paying $1,300 per pair of VR Glasses gets about three hours of mixed use per charge, so the purchase buys session-length work and does not cover a full shift.
Some people at Connect who wanted to try Meta's VR Glasses left without wearing them. The operating system was not ready for mass hands-on demos, according to The Ghost Howls, the XR newsletter at skarredghost.com [18]. On paper the device is specific: an OLED display at 2412x2288, a 70 by 66 degree field of view, a Snapdragon Reality Elite chip, 12 GB of RAM, eye, hand and face tracking, optional controllers, and a weight of about 100g [16].
Meta is pitching continuity, one assistant that goes wherever the wearer goes [1], but what it showed was a set of devices at different stages. The third-generation Ray-Ban Meta, with new styles such as Aviator, is an incremental step over the earlier models, in the newsletter's assessment [3]. The VR Glasses are months from shipping [2].
On how people use Meta's hardware, the record from the week is short. Meta said at its developer keynote that it had fixed search in the Quest Store, and developers have started seeing more conversions for their games, according to the newsletter [12]. Meta's CTO, Boz, told the newsletter's author in a quick interview that Quest 3S did not sell much more than Quest 3 [15].
The keynote did not cover the store's status, its number of apps, or how much money those apps make [13]. The newsletter's author drew a conclusion from that: "To me, this means that the situation is not good, so they preferred not to speak about it." [14]
Developers are being asked to build ahead of that uncertainty. Meta set up two prize pools of $1M each, one for apps built on Muse AI and one for hand-tracking VR and MR apps aimed at the new glasses [9][10]. That is $2M in total [11].
I would treat Muse as a feature of each device and judge each device on the one job it does. The tradeoff is that this sets aside the cross-device continuity Meta is selling [1].
The 2x2 has two axes. The first is whether the task needs a camera. The second is whether it happens on the move or in a seated session. In practice that puts the Audio Glasses in the camera-free, on-the-move box [4], the Ray-Bans in the camera, on-the-move box [3], and the VR Glasses in the seated box [5]. The fourth box, seated work that needs no camera, belongs to a laptop.
Before a purchase order goes out, I would set one number per box. The first is the time from unboxing to the first task Muse finishes faster than the phone in the wearer's pocket. The second is the share of wearers still using the device after 30 days. I would weigh that share above a count of Muse queries, since the count only shows how often people asked it something.
What to watch
- Whether Meta publishes Quest Store figures, such as app counts or developer revenue, before the VR Glasses ship in spring.
- Prices and ship dates for the third-generation Ray-Ban Meta and the camera-free Audio Glasses.
- Whether the VR Glasses operating system is ready for open public demos ahead of the spring launch.