Meta Delays Puck-Tethered XR Headset to 2027, Next Quest “Large Upgrade” to Current Gen

By
Scott Hayden
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35

Meta may be pushing back the release of an upcoming XR headset that tethers to a pocketable compute puck. Meanwhile, the company says its next-gen Quest will be a “large upgrade” over the current generation.

The News

Meta supposedly planned to release the device, codenamed ‘Phoenix’, in the second half of 2026, which is said to include a goggle-like form factor—also slated to offload compute and battery to a puck-like unit tethered to the headset.

Now, according to internal memos obtained by Business Insider, the release timeline of Phoenix has been pushed back to the first half of 2027.

Maher Saba, VP of Reality Labs Foundation, announced the change in an internal memo released December 4th, further noting that the decision arose from a meeting with Reality Labs leaders and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Successive XR prototypes | Image courtesy Meta

Saba maintained that the project should be “focused on making the business sustainable and taking extra time to deliver our experiences with higher quality.”

“Based on that, many teams in RL will need to adjust their plans and timelines,” Saba added. “Extending timelines is not an opportunity for us to add more features or take on additional work.”

A separate memo from metaverse leaders Gabriel Aul and Ryan Cairns added that the release date was pushed back in order to “give us a lot more breathing room to get the details right.”

Continuing: “There’s a lot coming in hot with tight bring-up schedules and big changes to our core UX, and we won’t compromise on landing a fully polished and reliable experience,” the memo said.

Additionally, Aul and Cairns’ memo maintained the company is currently working on its next-gen Quest, which is said to focus on immersive gaming. It’s also said to represent a “large upgrade” in capabilities from current devices, and will “significantly improve unit economics.”

Meta is reportedly also planning to release what Business Insider maintains will be a new “limited edition” XR device in 2026, codenamed ‘Malibu 2’. It’s uncertain what sort of device Malibu 2 is at this time.

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My Take

It’s difficult to say what the next Quest will shape up to be. Meta tends to run competing prototypes to see what fits best in the market, and may have a different strategy than anyone expects.

Here’s my current hunch: Quest 3S represents the company’s best chance to reach the low end of the market at $300 (cheaper on sale), and it may be in that position for at least another year. I don’t expect a cheap and cheerful headset from Meta for a while, even with the claim that the next Quest will “significantly improve unit economics.” Relative to what? Quest 3S? A potential Quest Pro 2? We simply don’t know.

Meta’s next real headset (not the limited edition thing) may likely be a high-end headset—think around $800 or $1,000 range—which ought to keep some hardcore Quest platform adherents on the upgrade pathway while possibly offering competition some new(ish) faces: namely Samsung Galaxy XR, Valve’s Steam Frame, and the current Apple Vision Pro M5 refresh. Okay, that’s less of a hunch, and more of a consensus from what everyone’s heard.

What is marginally more certain though is Meta doesn’t seem to be in the manufacturing stage just yet of anything, at least not according to the most recent supply chain leaks, or lack thereof, so I’d expect for a lot more hubbub midway through next year. Whatever the case, I’ve got my eye out for all of the above.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • polysix

    Yay… more quest standalone shit to hold the entire VR industry back with.

    • Hussain X

      Quest lineup is the most used PCVR headset on Steam.

      • Herbert Werters

        The thing is that there are now only mobile VR ports available on PCs. That's the problem, and it distorts a lot of things. It's one of the things holding back the VR industry. It also dampens the interest of “core” gamers.

        • Dragon Marble

          It's not because those games "have to run on a mobile chip". It's because they have to have a low budge.

          They have to have a low budge because there aren't enough PCVR buyers. There have never been — even before standalone was a thing.

          Maybe things would've been different if Valve had continued to support their platform with games.

          Stop blaming standalone. The Quest headsets actually brought more people into PCVR.

          • Herbert Werters

            Like so many others, you don’t really understand. I’m talking about hybrid games that can be played in VR and flat. They offer options. Like Resident Evil and other games on the PS5. It costs hardly anything more to develop and offers so much more. It hasn’t even been tried to see if this might be a way to get more “core” gamers interested in VR. There’s a big difference when you play flat games in VR.

          • Dragon Marble

            Only 2% of RE4 players played in VR. Probably only a small part of that 2% represent extra sales.

            Adding VR mode definitely costs more than "hardly anything". Otherwise Flat2VR wouldn't be selling Roboquest for $30.

          • Herbert Werters

            Resident Evil 4 Remake sold approximately 10 million copies by the end of 2024. That would mean that approximately 200,000 people played the game in VR.

            Now you want to tell me that it wasn't worth developing a VR mode for it. But for a game like Assassin's Creed Nexus VR, which sold around 400,000 copies? VR modders can implement a VR mode like that for free, just for the fun of it. Sorry, really?

            Come on. The modders aren't selling Roboquest VR. The game developers are selling the game. Roboquest is a flat game that has now been given a VR mode by modders and costs the same as the game without VR. I really don't understand you. What are you trying to say? ;) lol

          • Dragon Marble

            Roboquest is $25; Roboquest VR is $30. That's at least 20% markup to add VR support. In reality it must be much more than that because I don't think RyseUP will take a $25 cut for each VR copy sold.

            So it's not as cheap as you suggested to add VR to flat games.

            I have no interest in fighting a console war with you. I love PSVR2 and RE4. If you think 200,000 is a huge success, great! But I don't think you will dispute that it's just a drop in a bucket for CAPCOM.

            Even for Hybrids the economics is still not there. Otherwise we would've seen a lot more of them by now.

          • Herbert Werters

            Here in Germany, the VR version costs €1 more on Steam. No fighting, just facts.

          • Dragon Marble

            We know Steam does not update the exchange rates often. Game prices in other countries don't necessarily reflect the market prices.

          • Herbert Werters

            Neither is your example.

          • Herbert Werters

            I don't know what games you play, but there are so many flat games that blow away everything ever seen on Quest with very little budget.

            If you don't have to optimize endlessly for a pocket calculator, you can easily incorporate these free resources into your game.

          • Dragon Marble

            I played Roboquest VR for about an hour. I am not eager to jump back in, to be honest. I like Light Brigade a lot more. Hybrid games are really no substitute for built-for-VR games.

            If it's RE4 level goodness, then I would forgive all the immersion breaking stuff. But CAPCOM is only company making those games. Even Sony is not making them!

            Just have you expectation in check. That's all.

          • Herbert Werters

            That’s not the point. The point is how to introduce flat players to VR. Apparently, none of the VR games released so far are capable of doing that.

          • Dragon Marble

            We've had RE7, RE8, RE4, GT7 and Hitman. What does it have to take to get the flat players interested? I say let's forget about them. I am perfectly fine with games like Arizona Sunshine, Arken Age and Behemoth.

          • Herbert Werters

            You mention five games here. You realize that yourself, right?

        • Leisure Suit Barry

          PVCR is dead outside of mods

          Devs aren't going to make PCVR games when you can mod so many flat games, they don't sell enough

          • Herbert Werters

            Mobile VR is also “dead.” Just look at Meta’s revenue!

            Well, then developers should turn to development studios and publishers and develop decent VR versions of existing games. The junk that’s available for mobile VR headsets is worthless. Stagnation on both sides.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      No it"s not, any non standalone/tethered headset is actually holding the entire VR industry back. Wireless PCVR has become on par with DP (for the latest headsets with a real wifi 7/6Ghz router, and using stuff like SteamVR's foveated streaming).

  • Dragon Marble

    This is consistent with the budge cut. They are changing the plan from "prioritizing a 2026 release" to "taking extra time".

    Why? Part of it is the momentum they see from the glasses, which is where they are shifting resources to.

    They other reason is that Meta sees no competition. They took a look at the Vision Pro, Galaxy XR, and Steam Frame, and decided that none of them poses enough competition to warrant any urgency on their side.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Or they feel that the UI improvements they have come up with so far are not yet enough to bring Quest up to the much smoother user experience on visionOS/Android XR, which is why the Aul/Cairns memo said the release date was pushed back to

      give us a lot more breathing room to get the details right. […] There’s a lot coming in hot with tight bring-up schedules and big changes to our core UX, and we won’t compromise on landing a fully polished and reliable experience, […]

    • silvaring

      I think the yield or specs on the lenses and projectors in the Rayban Display (Schott / Lumus) caused Facebook to reassess the market. Remember Orion? Either a) Facebook deliberately made it seem like the 'prototype' was not anywhere near consumer ready, or b) engineering breakthroughs were made between the time of showing Orion, that led to them going all in on AR.

      I know facebook are a terrible company in many ways, but I feel like the whole Orion being a prototype and too expensive for consumers narrative wasnt just to confuse their competition, I feel that something changed that allowed them to scale. But this is just speculation on my part. What do you think?

      • Rogue Transfer

        Project Orion, like Project Half Dome, like Project Boba 3, and many other R&D prototypes were about exploring technology's limits(and problems) and promoting to consumers and stock investors.

        They're never intended to become products. They're experiments and also serve as a means to hype people & stock holders to invest.

  • Stephen Bard

    The "Quest 4" obviously needs OLED displays with a somewhat higher resolution, but only if it doesn't reduce the FOVs below that of the Quest 3. No battery on a tether!

    • kraeuterbutter

      for most ist needs a batterpack on the back, like the pico4
      also the pico4 is more heavy than a quest3 it feels half the weight on your head

      OLED – maybe to expensive..
      we dont want OLED which is not micro-Oled…
      normal Oled always comes with Mura until now

      resolution: 2560×2560 would be nice, its still a mobile headset

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth in April 2021:

    People are also asking about the Quest 3, which doesn’t exist yet, and everyone who is listening to us who is a reporter there isn’t a Quest 3, there’s only a Quest 2, but I did hint at an AMA earlier this year about Quest Pro because we do have a lot of things in development where we want to introduce new functionality to the headset along the kinds that people theorize that we would want to introduce, and that’s a little ways off still. It’s still not gonna happen this year.For those who are curious, Quest 2 is going to be in the market for a while – for a long while, and it’s gonna be, you know, I think the best bet for the most accessible way to get into VR and have a great experience.


    Quest 2 was sold from 2020-10 to 2024-06 when they ran out of stock, so almost four years, and was officially discontinued in 2024-09 with the Quest 3S announcement.

    Quest 3 released in 2023-10, 2.5 years after the above statement. And with the same lifespan it would have to be replaced by 2027-09. But with the prototypes targeting 2026 all canceled and the more Pro like Phoenix pushed to early 2027, Quest 3 may be their full featured gaming HMD for an even longer while.

  • Andrew Jakobs

    As long as their next upgrade headset isn't tethered and still has everything in the headset/headstrap.

  • pixxelpusher

    With the next Quest described as an "immersive gaming" headset and being a “large upgrade” to Quest 3 it makes sense to use the new pancake lens design from the Boba 3 prototype and have a wide FOV. It's what's needed for immersive gaming and what most gamers want. It would set Quest apart from all other headsets that are still stuck in the 100 degree field limit.

    • Rogue Transfer

      According to Meta, Boba 3 required a high-end PC GPU(it was using an RTX 5090) to render that increased FOV.

      The next Quest isn't going to be equivalent to an RTX 5090 or even a tenth its performance. So, we can't expect to see the Boba 3 or anything like it for the next Quest(or even the one after that, or the one after that, or the one after that!).

      Much as I'd love for such a wide FOV as Boba 3 turning into a product, it just isn't feasible for standalone to power it. It's like a repeat of the prototype Half Dome's increased FOV shown nearly 8 years ago, never coming to a product.

      • pixxelpusher

        I get that, but they needed that setup to simply show off the lenses in a research prototype situation. It's not a build unit. It was a very raw unit hardware wise. They're basically mocking up these units quickly to test possibilities. It wasn't running any assistive tech like eye tracking, and wouldn't have been optimized at a software level.

        Hardware wise it just needs to be able to render to whatever the display resolution is. The displays were 4K and Qualcomms yet to be released next gen chip (XR2 Gen 3) will easily handle 2x 4K displays standalone. They did have a standalone version at SIGGRAPH but I've never seen anything written up on it.

        Quest standalone graphics are always quite low poly, so it could all work in a model that's actually developed and optimized for that function. They could even choose to run 2x 3K displays instead of 4K and have a lower PPD but gain more performance. And eye tracked foveated rendering running at a system level (like Steam Frame) as well as ASW would boost performance.

        I feel if Meta wanted to focus in that direction, in the next 2 years all the pieces of the puzzle would be there to make it possible and a 2027 / 2028 release wouldn't be out of the question.

      • Bram

        Correct me if am wrong, but isn't it possible to bake the lensdistortion correction algorithms (for a large fov headset) into a custom chip to unload the cpu with that task as the applicable parametres are constant for every situation? And would this solve the problem of needing a beefy gpu?

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Lens distortion correction is done by a simple shader on the GPU. It never happened on the CPU, and getting this to work was a precondition for VR. Modern GPUs being able to run custom shaders was what enabled the Oculus Rift DK1with a high FoV not requiring extremely expensive aspheric lenses, using those from off the shelf magnifying glasses instead.

          This problem has been solved for more than a decade, the transformation is very cheap even on the most miserable mobile GPU. So no custom chip is required, but there also isn't any optimization potential to reduce the total render load here either.

      • Andrey

        Noone forces Meta to aim Boba 3's specs precisely.

        They could reduce the lenses' size (and thus FOV) to match the capabilities of future Snapdragon XR3 SoC + hopefully they will add eye tracking and foveated rendering will also play it's role in reducing the load on the performance from the bigger FOV (and yes I am aware that foveated rendering on standalone performed worse than expected by Meta's standards during their research at the time, but everything can change, especially if their future Quest headset will indeed have eye tracking – it will be a huge miss not to use it for anything else outside of animating avatar's eyes and navigating UI). So FOV may be anything above what Quest 3 has (obviously without face gasket) and up to what Boba 3 has.

        Hypothetically, if XR3 will be again twice more powerful graphics performance-wise compared to XR2 Gen2 in Quest 3, then we can expect from at least 25% to 50% of potential resolution – and FOV's if PPD will remain more-or-less the same as Quest 3's – increase. So it can be anything from around 130 to 160 degrees of FOV.

        Not to mention that we are talking about gaming oriented device. I understand that only "special" people work at Meta that have their own opinion about everything (and only this opinion is right), but just going to any forum like Reddit in any one of 100500 same topics about "What do you want to see in the future Quest headset?", FOV is most certainly in top-3 alongside MicroOLED/DP connection.

        If such headset will release – even without something as desirable as MicroOLED screens – it will literally destroy all the competitors, purely because noone else will be able to compare to it. All those fancy over-1k$ (or even 2k$) headsets with MicroOLED display will be completely blown away purely by FOV increase (and additional immersion coming from it) – obviously only if it will ship without Pimax's FOV problems like distortion on the edges, etc. And all other headsets that won't have any other real advantages – like the "allmighty" Steam Frame – will be thrown into oblivion the moment this thing will be just announced.

        But Meta like doing "Meta things", so I won't be surprised that after showing something as promising as Boba 3, after claming that next Quest headset will be a "large upgrade" and "gaming-oriented", after postponing it to 2027 they will release it even without something as basic as eye-tracking is in the end of 2025, when ALL released headsets already have it.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        True in principle, but all this goes out the window the moment you add fast eye tracking and foveated rendering. Valve had a special version of HL:A to demonstrate foveated streaming on Frame that only transferred the area the eye was looking at and left the rest black instead of rendering it at a lower resolution, and apparently people were still not able to notice that parts were missing.

        I'm not sure how long this would work while just looking straight forwards, but in principle ETFR decouples FoV from render requirements, you only ever need to render the same small foveated area at full resolution, with the rest either very course, at lower refresh rates, generate from previous frames or even black, as in Valve's Frame HL:A demo.

        The moment you solve ETFR, you also solve the problem of render load rising exponentially with higher FoV, and it no longer matters whether the total FoV is 100° or 200°(, ignoring the impact of having a round view projected onto a flat display, creating more rendering inefficiencies towards the edge with higher FoV).

  • ShaneMcGrath

    "Large Upgrade" I hope that means more FOV, Pair it with some new XR3 chip and I'd buy it even if the resolution stays the same as Quest 3, Resolution is decent enough already in my opinion, No need to waste CPU on adding more, Just use it to process bigger FOV instead.