A video buried in Quest's software shows Meta's next headset fitted with prescription lenses.
The leaker known as Luna found it inside Horizon OS, the software Quest headsets run, and Road to VR published the images. The headset is Project Phoenix, the slim mixed reality headset Meta hasn't named yet. Mixed reality means it shows you the room through its cameras and puts apps on top of it. The lenses look set to come from Zenni Optical, which already makes Meta's official prescription inserts.
The footage is blurred, but it's the first look at the hardware since a setup video leaked in July. That earlier video showed lens spacing you can adjust for each eye, nose clips you can swap for comfort, and hand and eye tracking, and it's already on our Meta Quest roadmap. The new images add sensors on the outside of each temple, the arms that run back toward your ears, and more on the underside pointing down. What the downward ones are for isn't known. Face tracking is one guess.
Phoenix gets close to the profile of a pair of glasses by moving its computer off your face. The processing lives in a separate unit on a cable, and one frame near the end of the video shows that cable trailing off the left temple. The unit itself hasn't been seen. A QR code in the same shot looks like a placeholder.
Hand and eye tracking need cameras on the front and close to your eyes too, even though the blurred images don't show them clearly. The Quest 3 and Quest 3S keep all of their hardware in the part strapped to your head. Phoenix splits it in two, and that split is how it gets thin enough to look closer to glasses than to a headset.
Meta hasn't given Phoenix a name, a price or a release date. Its Connect conference is later this month, and Meta has said only that it will show "the latest in VR, wearables, metaverse, and AI."