Meta is prioritizing shipping an ultralight Horizon OS headset with a tethered compute puck in 2026, multiple sources tell UploadVR.
The two previously leading candidates for a Quest 4 series, codenamed Pismo Low and Pismo High, have been canceled, these sources suggest, while the next candidate for a traditional form factor Quest most likely wouldn’t ship until 2027.
Simultaneously, the company is accelerating its plans for an extremely light open-periphery headset with a tethered compute puck running the same Horizon OS as today’s Quest headsets, codenamed Puffin, hoping to launch by the end of 2026. Meta is exploring multiple display system approaches for Puffin, at differing price points, and hasn’t yet settled on which it will ship.
VR enthusiasts Luna and Brad Lynch have also publicly posted about Meta’s changing headset release plans.
David Heaney
The Information first reported on Puffin’s existence around nine months ago, and a few weeks after Connect 2024 Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth confirmed that report to The Verge’s Alex Heath.
According to The Information’s report from last year, Puffin resembles “a bulky pair of glasses” and weighs less than 110 grams. The report also described Puffin as not including controllers, instead using the gaze-and-pinch input scheme introduced by Apple Vision Pro. Part of the reason for Puffin’s remarkably light weight is apparently that it offloads both the battery and computing hardware to an external tethered puck, which The Information said Meta “hopes” will be small enough to fit in the wearer’s pocket.
While it will run the same Horizon OS as today’s Quest headsets, Puffin will likely be marketed for and focused on virtual screens, acting as a portable multi-monitor setup to let you spawn as many virtual displays as you want, wherever you want, as big as you want, for both entertainment and productivity. While current standalone headsets can already do this, none are sleek and light enough to be appealing for most people.
David Heaney
This doesn’t necessarily mean that current gaming-focused Quest owners will have to wait for 2027 for a direct upgrade path for their headset, though.
Asus and Lenovo are working on headsets powered by the same Horizon OS that runs on Quest headsets. The Asus headset is coming from the company’s ROG gaming brand, and was described as a “performance gaming headset” when first announced last year.
A potential leak from Luna earlier this year suggested that this Asus ROG headset could have eye tracking, alongside more advanced displays than Quest 3.
David Heaney
It’s also important to note that Meta could cancel the entire Puffin project at any time, as it has repeatedly done with in-development headsets in the past, or spin up an entirely new headset project.
When confirming Puffin’s existence to Alex Heath after Connect 2024, Bosworth also detailed the stages of Meta’s hardware development cycle:
- Pre-Discovery: a dedicated team is always “prototyping the craziest stuff”, creating a “proof of experience” for each idea.
- Discovery: a “small number” of Pre-Discovery concepts are approved by executive review to proceed to the Discovery phase, where “a few” employees examine the practicalities of industrial design and cost.
- Prototyping: if deemed practical, Discovery concepts are prototyped, involving “maybe 10 times more people”, who build integrated hardware and software to bring the concept to life.
- Engineering Validation Test: “roughly half” of those prototypes go to this final stage, where they are put on the product roadmap. Of these EVTs, Meta executives apparently kill “about half” before they ship, while the others release to the public.
In his public Instagram ask-me-anything sessions, Bosworth has also repeatedly stressed that Meta is always working on multiple headsets in parallel, at various stages in this cycle, with most being canceled.
David Heaney
Still, Meta’s shifting priorities for headsets comes just weeks after the company’s financial results revealed that the revenue from its Reality Labs “metaverse and wearables” division was 6% lower in Q1 2025 than it was in Q1 2024.
Meta’s CFO Susan Li told investors that the drop was “due to lower Meta Quest sales, which were partially offset by increased sales of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses”.
This suggests that while Quest 3S had a strong launch quarter, and was a popular gift over the holiday season, its momentum didn’t carry through into the beginning of this year. Meta may thus be fundamentally re-evaluating its headset hardware strategy, hoping to launch a product that doesn’t just sell well at Christmas.
