Meta’s annual XR and AI focused Connect conference is in full gear this week. The biggest news dropped during the opening keynote, while day two will feature the Developer State of the Union keynote.

Watch the Meta Connect Developer State of the Union Keynote on September 24th at 10AM PT (your timezone here)

On day two of Connect, Meta is hosting its Developer State of the Union keynote which is more focused on developers. We expect to hear the latest on developer tools (especially AI-based tooling), programs, and features to make it easier to build content for Meta’s glasses and headsets. You can watch the livestream embedded above.

Watch the Meta Connect Keynote From Day One

Meta Connect 2026 kicked of with its usual opening keynote which saw the reveal of the company’s newest ‘VR Glasses’. Check out the first round of coverage:

• Meta Announces ‘VR Glasses’ Next-Gen XR Headset, Priced at $1,300
• Meta VR Glasses Hands-on: What Apple Vision Pro Probably Should Have Been
• Meta Ray-Ban Display is Finally Rolling Out Internationally Starting Today
• ‘Beat Saber’ is Getting a Big Hand-tracking Update Next Year, Ditching Blocks for Orbs & Rods

Beyond the headlining keynotes, the Connect 2026 agenda includes additional sessions along four tracks: VR, AI glasses, AI, and Horizon. Meta has confirmed all of these sessions will be viewable on-demand online once released.

The post Watch the Meta Connect 2026 Developer State of the Union Keynote Right Here appeared first on Road to VR.

Announced today at Meta Connect, Cardmada is a hand-tracked, free-to-play tactical card battler set in a Wonderland-inspired world coming to Meta VR Glasses and Quest 3.

Said to be ‘designed from the ground up for natural hand and eye interaction,’ Cardmada has you take command of a pirate ship, recruiting a crew of misfits to combat rival captains in head-to-head battles. You will build poker-inspired combinations of cards to trigger cannon attacks and outmaneuver your opponents to victory.

There was not a lot of additional information provided, but looking through the provided screenshots (see below), the game clearly has mixed reality support and the unlockable rewards you would expect to see in a free-to-play title.

Concept art provided by Meta depicts different ship types and three character archetypes: Skullywags, Queen’s Armada, and Whisperwakes.

Cardmada can be wishlisted now on the Meta Horizon store for Meta VR Glasses and Quest 3.

Dice Throne Digital is a free-to-play adaptation of the popular fantasy-themed tabletop strategy game coming to Meta VR Glasses & Quest 3 with crossplay support across XR devices, mobile, and PC. It is expected to launch in early 2027.

Announced at Meta Connect today, Dice Throne Digital spatializes the popular dice-and-card game, which has sold over 1.5M physical copies worldwide and raised over $18M across multiple crowdfunding campaigns.

You will compete with other players in a fantasy-based battle, embodying your chosen heroes and rolling dice to trigger their special abilities and playing cards to manipulate dice rolls in your favor. Attacks will play out in front of you on a mixed reality tabletop board.

The original tabletop game has forty-five different heroes as of July 2026, spread across multiple seasons and crossovers with Marvel including the X-Men, Black Panther, Black Widow, Deadpool, Captain Marvel, and Doctor Strange. We do not know if these will carry over to Dice Throne Digital. The images provided to us show several original characters pictured below.

With the game being free-to-play, we expect new cards, dice, and characters to be unlockable through a combination of playtime rewards and in-app purchases.

You can wishlist Dice Throne Digital on the Meta Horizon store now.

Meta VR Glasses were just officially announced. Priced at $1300, they have 2.4K micro-OLED displays, weigh 100 grams, and are powered by a tethered puck with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset.

The puck runs the same operating system as Quest 3, and supports all the same content, rendered at notably higher resolution thanks to a combination of the more powerful chipset (essentially an XR2 Gen 3 by a different name) and eye-tracked foveated rendering. It features 12GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and there’s a microSD slot in the puck to expand it.

The caveat to the content compatibility is that Meta VR Glasses will not come with controllers by default, but you’ll be able to buy Touch Plus controllers separately (available in a new all-black color), or pair the controllers from your existing Quest 3 or Quest 3S, and there’ll be a bundle with controllers “in some retail channels”.

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon Reality Elite, Its New Flagship XR Chipset

Qualcomm just announced Snapdragon Reality Elite, its new flagship XR chipset, and it will debut in the compute puck of Xreal’s Aura Android XR device this fall.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The stark difference between Meta VR Glasses and any Quest, however, is the split architecture, and the dramatic reduction in weight and bulk this enables.

Meta VR Glasses have no onboard computing, not even a tracking coprocessor, and thus entirely rely on the 300-gram puck, which is roughly the size of two phones stuck together and provides both power and data over a thin and flexible hybrid fiber optic cable.

Meta VR Glasses have an open-periphery design, so you naturally see the real world to your sides and below you. The frame is built with a magnesium alloy that minimizes weight while also enabling a fanless, passively cooled design that weighs “around” 100 grams.

Another key difference is the display and field of view. With dual 120Hz 2412×2288 HDR micro-OLED displays, Meta VR Glasses have the highest resolution of any Meta headset to date, and are the company’s first non-LCD headset since the original Oculus Quest in 2019.

The device supports the Dolby Vision HDR format, and Meta says it’s the first VR product to be IMAX Enhanced certified.

The form factor brings a major optical compromise, though: the field of view. Meta advertises 70° horizontal × 66° vertical (equating to ~87° diagonal) compared to the roughly 110° horizontal × 96° vertical of Quest 3.

The narrower field of view makes Meta VR Glasses feel far less immersive than a Quest headset when the optional light blockers are attached for fully immersive experiences. But, somewhat ironically given the name of the product, Meta VR Glasses should shine without the light blockers in passthrough mixed reality, where a natural view of your periphery is often preferable to darkness.

Meta plans to market the product as “a private cinema, multiple monitor workspace, and game console in one device that fits in your bag”.

Essentially, Meta VR Glasses at its core is the same market proposition as the Xreal Aura Android XR device but with a VR-style passthrough display system that offers a larger field of view (~87° diagonal vs Xreal’s 70°), higher resolution, and full opacity, alongside the inclusion of eye tracking and optional tracked controllers. We do not yet know the price of Xreal Aura.

To expand the library of content available to Meta VR Glasses owners who don’t buy Touch Plus controllers, Meta announced a swathe of new hand tracking VR and mixed reality games, including a new hand-tracked Beat Saber mode called Flux. You can read about the gaming announcements here.

For the first time for a Meta standalone device, you can also plug in any USB-C DisplayPort device to the puck, including a phone, laptop, or gaming handheld, and have it shown as a virtual screen, without the need for a capture card.

Every New Game & Game Update Announced For Meta VR Glasses

Several new games are coming to Meta VR Glasses as early as Spring 2027, alongside major updates to existing games.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

Meta VR Glasses will also feature the first implementation of Hologram, the company’s realistic avatar tech. Similar to Apple Vision Pro’s Personas, it will both let you join flatscreen WhatsApp video calls as a photorealistic face-tracked avatar, and appear as a full-scale realistic avatar in calls with other Meta VR Glasses (and eventually Quest 3) owners.

However, at launch in spring, your spatial Hologram will be a stereoscopic video stream, not volumetric. It displays at true scale, but is only seen as a front-angle view. Even if you change your perspective, the Hologram will stay as a head-on perspective, like billboarded assets in a video game. Meta says it plans to evolve Hologram over time post-launch to become a truly 6DoF 3D system, at which point it will become the default platform-level avatar experience for its VR platform, effectively superseding the cartoon Meta Avatars.