AIBRIEF
Meta's next headset leaked via Quest firmware assets as glasses shaped and tethered to a separate puck, echoing Google and Xreal's XR designs ahead of Meta Connect.
Meta's next headset, internally "Project Phoenix," surfaced not through a Meta announcement but as visual assets embedded in a recent Quest firmware update. UploadVR first reported the find, with Gizmodo carrying the aggregation.
The leaked images show a glasses-shaped device with nose pads and outward-facing sensors mounted on the temples and under the arms. The headset is tethered to a separate compute puck roughly phone-sized with extra heft, comparable to Xreal's Aura glasses. The puck is not pictured in the firmware assets. VR dataminer Nori (@noridoesvr) modeled a 2027-era Phoenix compute unit with a waistband clip and top-mounted cooling exhaust, based on physical prototypes he had seen. He flagged the design as still tentative.
Project Phoenix is expected to behave like a Quest 3 successor, using XR passthrough rather than true optical AR. The form factor mirrors Google's Aura XR glasses and Xreal's Aura, putting three vendors on the same glasses-plus-tethered-puck shape within a 12-month window.
Pricing, target use cases, exact release window, and final puck design remain undisclosed. Meta Connect, Meta's annual hardware showcase, is described as imminent, and Meta may reveal more about Phoenix there. The open question for the event: is this the shape Meta wants XR to take.