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.
Meta Plans Ultralight Headset With Tethered Puck For 2027
Meta reportedly plans a new extremely light headset with a tethered compute & battery puck for 2027 instead of the canceled Quest Pro 2.
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. Report Pu The 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.gaze-and-pinchA
from Luna earlier this year suggested that this Asus ROG headset could have eye tracking, alongside more advanced displays than Quest 3.
Potential Leak: Asus ROG Headset To Have Face & Eye Tracking
VR enthusiast Luna received a tip claiming the Asus ROG headset running Meta Horizon OS will have face & eye tracking.
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:Horizon OSPre-Discovery:
a dedicated teampotential leak
Meta Confirms Quest Pro 2 Cancelation & 2027 Ultralight Headset
Meta confirmed to The Verge earlier reporting that it canceled a 2027 Quest Pro 2 candidate and is working on an ultralight headset with a puck.
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.
- Still, Meta’s shifting priorities for headsets comes just weeks after the company’s financial results 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
, and was a
Meta’s XR Revenue Declined Due To Decreased Quest Sales
Meta Reality Labs quarterly revenue declined 6% year-over-year in Q1, and the company says this was “due to lower Meta Quest sales”.
over the holiday season, its momentum didn’t carry through into the beginning of this year. Meta