Walmart is offering Quest 3S for $250 again, $50 off, and it comes with the $50 VR blockbuster Batman: Arkham Shadow.
That's the price for the 128GB base model, and the 256GB storage model is also on sale for $50 off, bringing it down to $350.
As well as including Batman: Arkham Shadow, the offering comes with 3 months of the Horizon+ games subscription, as with all new Quest headset purchases.
Arkham Shadow was officially included with all Quest 3S purchases for the headset's first seven months on the market, though this was effectively extended during multiple sales and honored for any SKUs with the game's logo on the box. The game, which Meta recently canceled the sequel for, earned a 4.5-star rating in our review, and it's a rare example of a truly made-for-VR AAA title.
This is far from the only time we've seen Quest 3S on sale for $250, and over the holidays it even dropped to as low as $200 for Costco members. But it still remains immense value – a fully standalone and wireless VR headset with tracked controllers, hand tracking, and mixed reality for less than the price of a traditional games console.
One consideration you may want to make if you're considering jumping into VR with this deal, however, is whether the higher-end Quest 3 or Valve's upcoming Steam Frame might better suit your needs.
While Quest 3S can run all the same content as Quest 3, and has the same fundamental capabilities (including the same XR2 Gen 2 chipset and 8GB RAM), Quest 3 features Meta's advanced pancake lenses which are clearer and sharper over a wider area, have a wider field of view, and have precise separation adjustment, making them suitable for essentially everyone's eyes. Meanwhile, Steam Frame has a significantly more comfortable design and promises to make wireless PC VR seamless.
But Quest 3 costs twice as much as Quest 3S on sale, and Steam Frame is likely to cost around three times as much. If you're looking to jump into VR on a budget, or gift a friend or loved one, it's impossible to beat the raw value of Quest 3S.
Google's YouTube has launched an official visionOS app.
While it was already possible to access YouTube on Apple Vision Pro headsets through the Safari web browser, the new official app offers a streamlined native-feeling interface, support for watching 180° and 360° immersive video (including 3D), and, for YouTube Premium subscribers, the ability to download videos for offline viewing.
The official YouTube visionOS app on Apple Vision Pro.
The player also adapts to the varying aspect ratios of videos on YouTube, avoiding the black-bars problem and revealing more of your real or virtual environment.
On the M5 Apple Vision Pro, the app supports up to 8K, while the original M2 Vision Pro is limited to 4K.
The official YouTube visionOS app on Apple Vision Pro.
YouTube first announced that it planned to build a visionOS app just days after the original headset's launch.
In the two years since, multiple third-party apps have emerged to fill the gap, including firstly and most prominently the $5 app Juno, built by the same developer as the Apollo phone app for Reddit. But in late 2024 YouTube forced Juno off the visionOS App Store.
Other third-party offerings include Tubular Pro, which has advanced features including SponsorBlock integration and its own theater environments.
The official YouTube visionOS app on Apple Vision Pro.
The official YouTube app for Apple Vision Pro is available for free on the visionOS App Store, with offline downloads enabled by a YouTube Premium subscription.
While its arrival on visionOS could be considered surprising by some because of Google's competing Android XR, YouTube operates somewhat independently from Google, and Google has offered iOS versions of its most popular services for almost two decades now.
YouTube is also available on Meta's Horizon OS, including with co-watching support, but the app on Quest is visually less polished compared to visionOS and Android XR.
Meta and EssilorLuxottica sold more than 7 million smart glasses in 2025, and they were the "dominant driver" of the Ray-Ban owner's wholesale growth in H2.
Exactly one year ago, EssilorLuxottica told its investors that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses had sold 2 million units so far, a period spanning from the launch in October 2023 until February 2025.
Now, during its Q4 2025 earnings report, the company announced that it sold 7 million units of Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses in 2025 alone – meaning more than triple that of 2024. This suggests that around 9 million have been sold to date since the launch of Ray-Ban Meta two and a half years ago.
For comparison, Quest 2 sold an estimated 20 million units in two and a half years, while Steam Deck sold around 4 million units over the same timespan.
EssilorLuxottica says smart glasses drove significant growth for both its wholesale and retail business, describing the former in North America as "exponential".
What Is EssilorLuxottica?
The French-Italian giant EssilorLuxottica is the largest eyewear company in the world by far. It owns iconic brands like Ray-Ban, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, and Persol, and has exclusive licenses with major fashion companies like Prada, Armani, Burberry, and Chanel. It also owns Sunglass Hut, and has almost 18,000 retail stores in total worldwide.
Meta has so far partnered with EssilorLuxottica for six smart glasses products:
The sales figure comes one month after Bloomberg reported that Meta and EssilorLuxottica were discussing doubling or even tripling smart glasses production capacity.
When announcing the 2 million sales mark a year ago, EssilorLuxottica told investors that it planned to increase annual production capacity to 10 million units by the end of 2026, citing the "great success" of the product. Bloomberg's report suggests that target is being increased to 20 or 30 million.
It's undeniable at this point that smart glasses are an appealing consumer product. The question now is whether Meta will maintain its lead once serious competition from Apple and Google arrives.
Google has repeatedly teased smart glasses with a HUD at events like TED and I/O, and announced last year that it's working with the eyewear companies Gentle Monster and Warby Parker on Gemini smart glasses, and will work with Kering Eyewear in the future. Multiple South Korean news outlets have reported that Samsung plans to launch a Meta Ray-Ban Display competitor this year, powered by Google software, a similar strategy to the Galaxy XR headset.
Meanwhile, in October Bloomberg reported that Apple moved staff off the cheaper and lighter Vision headset project to prioritize shipping smart glasses sooner. Apple's first glasses could be revealed as soon as this year ahead of a release in 2027, the report claimed.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says that, as with all new headsets, the company will "learn from" Steam Frame if it's successful.
During an "ask my anything" session on his Instagram page, when asked whether Meta will be in competition with Steam Frame or "support" it, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth replied by saying that it's "a little bit of both".
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"It is a little bit of both. I have said this before—and I will say it again, because it is really true—every time there is a new headset, we learn from it. We learn how consumers respond to the decisions made regarding architecture, resolution, and cameras. For example, with the Steam Frame, it looks like they included a wireless dongle. We experimented with a dongle many times to make a wireless link work, but we decided it was just too much hassle. They chose to go that route. If consumers love it, maybe there is a bigger market there than we realized.
Every time someone launches something new, it is an experiment that costs me nothing, which is great. Obviously, we do compete with them. Quite a few people use Quest specifically because it is not just standalone, but also capable of PC gaming. I think that is a strong value proposition: being able to use the device both with a PC and without one. However, Steam is trying to build an entire ecosystem, including portable PCs. So, ultimately, it is a little bit of both."
Bosworth has given a relatively similar answer for past VR headsets and accessories, suggesting that Meta will assess it based on how consumers respond, i.e. how well it sells. For example, he once claimed that if the Pico Trackers sold exceptionally well, Meta would "have to" make an equivalent.
"Every time someone launches something new, it is an experiment that costs me nothing, which is great", Bosworth quips in the Steam Frame response.
The Meta CTO specifically points out Steam Frame's included wireless dongle as something his company tried in the past but "decided it was just too much hassle".
In late 2022, Meta partnered with D-Link to ship VR Air Bridge, a $100 official accessory for gaming PCs to directly connect to Quest 2 for Air Link, a somewhat similar concept. But whereas Steam Frame itself creates the hotspot that its dongle seamlessly connects to, and the headset has a dedicated 6 GHz radio for this, VR Air Bridge was a decidedly lower-effort approach, a traditional 5 GHz hotspot with a somewhat clunky setup process.
Is Bosworth right that a dongle is "too much hassle", or as with Quest Pro, is this another example of Meta deciding that a general idea is bad because its specific implementation was poor?
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth claims that even after the cuts, the company is still investing more in VR content than anyone else, and more than it was 4 years ago.
If you somehow missed it: last month Meta shut down three of its acquired VR game studios, conducted significant layoffs at a fourth, canceled the Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel, and announced the shutdown of Horizon Workrooms and its Quest headsets for business offering. These actions came a month after the company officially confirmed "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables".
Despite this, when asked to provide "the truth" about "doom and gloom" for Quest during an "ask me anything" session on his Instagram page, Bosworth responded by claiming that Meta is still investing more in VR content than any other company – and more than it was in 2022, at the height of the Quest 2 era.
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"There is a lot of doom and gloom about it—mostly overwrought, but I understand why it exists. Emotionally, we have to navigate two realities. First, there is a real cause for sadness. We had people doing work we were excited about, whether at the OS layer or great studios delivering great titles. Ultimately, we realized that the integrated vision we were pursuing with Horizon and VR was overwrought, and the investment we put in was larger than the growth of the ecosystem allowed. That is a real loss, and we are allowed to feel sad about those things.
On the other side, Meta remains extremely bullish on VR. Adjusting our investment profile was done specifically so that we could continue to invest. We are still investing more in content than anyone else, and more than we were four years ago. While we have receded from the "high water mark," we are still very much a net positive investor in the ecosystem. Furthermore, these internal changes unblock roadmaps for us on hardware; the next two devices we are looking at are very exciting.
I don't want to take away from the sadness regarding cancelled projects like another Arkham, though I wish there was more appreciation for the fact that we got the first one. Regarding community accountability and my December AMA comments about wearables versus VR: I noted then that these areas are separate and we can do both. That remains true. If VR were growing at the rate we wished, we likely wouldn't have made these changes, but we cannot invest infinitely. Our investment must match the size of the growth. The ecosystem is growing—just more slowly than we hoped—and we are still investing. That is the story."
Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey made a similar claim last month, but Bosworth saying it serves as an official proclamation from Meta itself.
Still, with most of its acquired VR gaming studios now closed, that "content" investment will not be arriving in the form of first-party blockbusters. Instead, Bosworth is likely referring to investment in third-party VR content.
In an interview with Axios last month, Bosworth said that Meta will now "focus a lot more on the third-party content library, the ecosystem that's developed there".
Whether or not Meta will follow through on this suggestion of continuing to fund third-party VR content remains to be seen.
In an interview with Alex Heath, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth seemed to confirm the leak that a Quest 4 is still on the roadmap.
Back in June, UploadVR reported that the 2026 candidates for a Quest 4 series, codenamed Pismo Low and Pismo High, had been canceled. Then, in December, internal Meta memos leaked that revealed the company is working on a gaming-focused headset set to be a "large upgrade" over Quest 3, but without subsidization, suggesting a notably higher price.
This, to be clear, is in addition to the widely reported ultralight mixed reality headset with a tethered puck that the memo suggested should launch in the first half of 2027.
Given Meta's recent announcement of "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables", which was followed by the shutdown of three of its acquired VR game studios, significant layoffs at a fourth, the cancelation of the Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel, and the deprecation of Horizon Workrooms and its Quest headsets for business offering, many in the industry have speculated that the new Quest 4 candidate may have already been canceled.
Last month, Meta's CFO Susan Li told investors that the company still has "optimism in the future of VR", and that it's still "building future headsets". While this did spark hope of a Quest 4 still in the works, nothing in the statement confirmed what kind of headsets these were. But a recent statement from Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth seems to.
When asked during his Davos interview with veteran tech journalist Alex Heath, which you should go watch in full, whether "the metaverse is over", Bosworth's reply included "I think it's officially leaked we've got two devices on the roadmap that we're super excited about coming out over the course of a period of time".
The "leak" Bosworth mentions is clearly the December memos – and by bringing this up now and speaking in the present tense, it strongly suggests that the gaming-focused Quest 4 candidate has not been canceled.
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Bosworth's comment from the interview with Alex Heath.
As to when we might expect these future Meta headsets, Bosworth stays tight-lipped. When pressed by Heath on what "a period of time" meant, he simply replied "a period of time - it could be anything, could be tomorrow".
Based on the leaked memos and conversations with sources back in December, UploadVR's understanding is that the ultralight headset should arrive in the first half of 2027, and the more traditional Quest 4 no earlier than the second half of 2027.
Additionally, Horizon OS firmware sleuth Luna reports that one codename floating around for the new Quest 4 is "Griffin".
One codename floating around for Meta Quest 4 is Project "Griffin"
Meanwhile, names for candidates for the ultralight headset with tethered puck have included "Puffin", "Loma", and "Phoenix".
The ultralight headset will be primarily focused on spawning virtual screens for productivity and entertainment, while the Quest 4 would continue the traditional Quest focus on immersive gaming.
Possible Name
"Quest Air"
"Quest 4"
Codenames
Phoenix/Loma/Puffin
Griffin
Form Factor
Tethered Puck
All-In-One
Focus
Virtual Screens
Immersive Gaming
Release
H1 2027
Sometime Later
Keep in mind that Meta's hardware roadmap is constantly shifting, and the company frequently spins up and cancels headsets before they ship. When a specific product gets close to shipping, we'll bring you any reliable rumors of its imminent arrival. Until then, be ready for anything planned to get canceled or delayed.
Valve says it needs to "revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing" for Steam Frame and Steam Machine amid the global memory and storage shortage.
When announcing the headset and consolized PC back in November, Valve said they would ship in "early 2026". For pricing, it told UploadVR it was "aiming" to sell Steam Frame for less than the $1000 Index full-kit, and suggested that the Steam Machine would be competitive with building a PC with similar parts.
Now, in a blog post on Steam, Valve says that while it had originally planned to share prices and release dates by now, the "limited availability and growing prices" of memory and storage mean it "must revisit" its plan for both.
"When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).
Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change. We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible."
The company says its goal is still to ship in the first half of this year, but notes that it has "work to do" to "land on" concrete prices and launch dates.
"We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible", Valve promises.
Snap spun its Specs AR glasses into its own subsidiary, and reconfirmed that it plans to launch the consumer product this year.
"Establishing Specs Inc. as a wholly-owned subsidiary provides greater operational focus and alignment, enables new partnerships and capital flexibility including the potential for minority investment, allows us to grow a distinct brand, and supports clearer valuation of the business as we work towards the public launch of Specs later this year", the company behind Snapchat says.
The new Specs Inc subsidiary is currently hiring for nearly 100 open roles globally, it says, in preparation for the launch.
What Are Snap Spectacles & Snap Specs?
The current Snap Spectacles are $99/month AR glasses for developers ($50/month if they're students), intended to let them develop apps for the Specs consumer product the company intends to ship this year.
Spectacles have a 46° diagonal field of view, angular resolution comparable to Apple Vision Pro, relatively limited computing power, and a built-in battery life of just 45 minutes. They're also the bulkiest AR device in "glasses" form factor we've seen yet, weighing 226 grams. That's almost 5 times as heavy as Ray-Ban Meta glasses, for an admittedly entirely unfair comparison.
But Snap CEO Evan Spiegel claims that the consumer Specs will have "a much smaller form factor, at a fraction of the weight, with a ton more capability", while running all the same apps developed so far.
As such, what's been more important to keep track of, to date, is Snap OS, not the developer kit hardware.
Snap OS is relatively unique. While on an underlying level it's Android-based, you can't install APKs on it, and thus developers can't run native code or use third-party engines like Unity. Instead, they build sandboxed "Lenses", the company's name for apps, using the Lens Studio software for Windows and macOS.
In Lens Studio, developers use JavaScript or TypeScript to interact with high-level APIs, while the operating system itself handles the low-level core tech like rendering and core interactions. This has many of the same advantages as the Shared Space of Apple's visionOS: near-instant app launches, interaction consistency, and easy implementation of shared multi-user experiences without friction. It even allows the Spectacles mobile app to be used as a spectator view for almost any Lens.
Snap OS doesn't support multitasking, but this is more likely a limitation of the current hardware than the operating system itself.
Since releasing Snap OS in the latest Spectacles kit in late 2024, Snap has repeatedly added new capabilities for developers building Lenses, and late last year launched Snap OS 2.0, adding and improving first-party apps like Browser, Gallery, and Spotlight to bring the AR platform closer to being ready for consumers.
Apple acquired Q.ai, reportedly for $1.6 billion, a startup working on converting "silent speech" into text. The technology could be crucial for AR glasses.
If the $1.6 billion value widely reported by mainstream news outlets such as Reuters is accurate, it would represent Apple's second largest acquisition to date, behind only Beats.
Since its founding in 2022, Q.ai has operated in "stealth mode", staying very secretive about exactly what it's working on. But the background of its three co-founders, as well as details in a patent filing, provide strong hints as to what the technology is.
Aviad Maizels, the CEO, previously founded PrimeSense, the company that Apple acquired in 2013 to build Face ID. PrimeSense also licensed some of its technology to Microsoft for the original Kinect. Dr. Yonatan Wexler, the CTO, is a world-class computer vision expert who was the VP of R&D at OrCam, a company which miniaturized high-end computer vision into a tiny device that clips onto eyeglasses.
The idea of "silent speech" is to let you silently dictate text by sensing the subvocal movements of your speech muscles. You could therefore send a sensitive message while in public, completely privately, or direct an AI assistant without other people around you knowing.
The fundamental idea is not new, and another startup, Alterego, is working on a hardware-based approach that uses sensors attached to your jaw.
What makes Q.ai's approach special, if its patents are any indication, is that it's a computer vision approach, using cameras pointed at your jaw instead of attached to it.
For example, the patent Detection of silent speech refers to a "optical sensing head" located "in proximity to a face of the user" that "senses light reflected from the face and to output a signal in response to the detected light".
Apple could potentially integrate Q.ai's technology into future Apple Vision headsets, AirPods stems, and the smart glasses that Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claim the company is working on.
Meta, meanwhile, is betting on letting you scribble letters on a surface such as your leg, sensing it with an sEMG band worn on your wrist.
What's clear already is that regardless of which technology wins out, the ability to enter text privately while wearing smart glasses in public will be crucial if the form factor ever hopes to supplant the smartphone.
With Horizon OS v85 PTC, Quest 3 can turn any surface into a virtual keyboard, and Meta says you can remap the Quest 3S action button.
The Public Test Channel (PTC) is the beta release channel of Quest's Horizon OS. If you opt in, your headset receives a pre-release build of each upcoming version.
Note that there are often features in the eventual stable version not present in the PTC, and occasionally (but rarely) features or changes in the PTC don't make it to the stable version.
Here are 2 key features Meta is testing in Horizon OS v85 PTC:
Surface Keyboard
Text entry is a notorious challenge for XR devices when you're not carrying a Bluetooth keyboard.
Exclusively available as an experimental feature on Quest 3, Surface Keyboard adds a virtual keyboard with a virtual touchpad on top of any surface, such as a table or desk.
To set it up, you place your hands flat on the table where you want the keyboard to be positioned, and a few seconds later it spawns. This is the height calibration step.
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UploadVR testing the Horizon OS v85 PTC Surface Keyboard with Touchpad.
Testing Surface Keyboard out, as you can see in the video above, I found it to be remarkably accurate. The ability to rest my hands makes it far preferable to a floating virtual keyboard, and I can type far faster already. It seems to predict the pressure of your fingers against a surface, not just the contact, making it possible.
I was far less impressed with the virtual touchpad. While it works, and is less strenuous than reaching out your arm to point, it often registers false positive inputs when you're not directly looking at it.
Another notable limitation is that Surface Keyboard only shows up in the Horizon OS home space, passthrough or virtual. Meta has an API for developers to use the floating keyboard, and we'll keep an eye out for any signs of a similar API for Surface Keyboard when the feature launches to the stable channel.
Meta has been researching this technology for at least six years, and executives showed off a well-along prototype in 2023, with Mark Zuckerberg claiming he could reach 100 words per minute. However, that prototype required a tracking marker tag on the table, as could be seen in the clips Meta shared at the time. And the company didn't disclose the error rate of the prototype.
Then, in 2024, researchers from Meta and ETH Zurich said that they had solved the problem of turning any surface into a keyboard, without markers, by combining a neural network that predicts touch events with a language model.
Meta hasn't said whether this research is what led to the shipping feature, but it seems likely to at least be related.
You can find Surface Keyboard in the Advanced settings on Horizon OS v85 if you have a Quest 3.
It's unclear why the feature isn't (yet) available on Quest 3S.
Remap Quest 3S Action Button
While Quest 3S doesn't currently have the Surface Keyboard feature, it does get its own new exclusive feature in Horizon OS v85 PTC, according to Meta.
Quest 3S has an 'Action Button', which, since the headset launched, has served one function: toggling passthrough. Press it while in a VR game and the game will pause and you'll see the real world. It's essentially a "pause VR, I need to see my surroundings" button.
Now, with v85 PTC, Meta says that Quest 3S owners can remap the Action Button.
Our Quest 3S does not yet have v85 PTC, so we don't yet know what it can be remapped to. If you have a Quest 3S running Horizon OS v85 PTC and have this ability, please let us know in the comments below.
Navigator Set To Be Default & Horizon Feed Removed
If you missed it, earlier this week we reported Meta's announcement that "starting" in Horizon OS v85 stable, the new 'Navigator' UI will become the default, and, separately, the Horizon Feed will be removed.
In the PTC build of Horizon v85, at least on my Quest 3, that hasn't happened yet. This is likely another of Meta's very slow "rollouts".
UPDATE February 3: our Quest 3 received a further sub-update adding the Touchpad to the Surface Keyboard feature. This article has been updated to reflect that.
Meta CFO Susan Li says the company still has "optimism in the future of VR", and confirmed that it's still "building future headsets".
Li made the comment during Meta's Q4 2025 earnings call this week, in response to a Deutsche Bank analyst asking whether the Reality Labs division would have a "narrow focus on wearables".
"However, consumer adoption of VR has generally been on a slower growth path than wearables, and we are rebalancing our Reality Labs portfolio to reflect this", Li also said, reiterating what CTO Andrew Bosworth declared in Davos last week.
"So, we are meaningfully reducing our investment in VR and Horizon this year, but we’re growing our investment in wearables to capitalize on the momentum that we’re seeing in our position as a market leader", she continued.
Meta first officially confirmed this shifting spending strategy in December. Then, earlier this month the company shut down three of its acquired VR game studios, conducted significant layoffs at a fourth, canceled the Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel, and announced the shutdown of Horizon Workrooms and its Quest headsets for business offering.
That decision came after 2025 saw Quest headset sales decrease compared to 2024, while Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses sales tripled.
Earlier in the Q4 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the company's reduction in spending would make VR "a profitable ecosystem over the coming years".
The Reality Labs division of Meta, which handles VR, Horizon Worlds, and smart glasses, recorded record spending in Q4, just shy of $7 billion. Given revenue of just under $1 billion, that resulted in a "loss" of around $6 billion.
Reality Labs continues to be heavily focused on research and development, though, and much of this "loss" is actually the spending towards developing true AR glasses, the consumer tech product that companies like Apple, Meta, and Google believe will define the next wave of personal computing.
Zuckerberg told investors to expect Reality Labs losses to finally peak in 2026, with Li stating that it's Meta's "expectation" that the losses will start to decrease in 2027, depending on how the market develops.
As to the "headsets", plural, that Susan Li was referring to, leaked internal memos from early December revealed that in addition to the widely reported ultralight headset with a tethered puck, Meta was also now working on a traditional new Quest focused on "immersive gaming".
The memo indicated that the headset, which wouldn't be expected until late 2027 at the very earliest, should bring a "large upgrade" over Quest 3, but no longer be subsidized, carrying a higher price. That tracks with Zuckerberg's reference to VR becoming "profitable" for Meta "over the coming years".
Many in the industry have speculated that this headset may have already been canceled in the wake of Meta's other VR cuts, but Li's reference to "headsets" may suggest it's still in the works. Only time – or yet another leak – will tell.
Lynx-R2, coming "this summer", is set to have the widest field of view of any standalone headset to date.
French startup Lynx repeatedly failed to meet its deadlines for its R1 headset, which it Kickstarted, and while originally envisioned as a $500 competitor to Meta Quest headsets, the price for new orders rose to $850 and then $1300 as the company pivoted to primarily targeting businesses.
Now, Lynx has revealed the key specifications of its next headset, which it first teased in October.
At the time, Lynx founder Stan Larroque told UploadVR that his company has "learned so much with the R1", and will not do a crowdfunding campaign. A month later, Lynx revealed that Google had "terminated" its agreement to use Android XR, such that it will instead run LynxOS, the company's own open-source Android fork.
Lynx-R2
Similar to Quest 3 and Pico 4 Ultra, Lynx-R2 is a fully standalone headset powered by Qualcomm's XR2 Gen 2 chipset and 16GB RAM, with two color passthrough cameras, four tracking cameras, as well as a depth sensor and IR illuminators.
It has an open periphery design, like Samsung Galaxy XR, with the ability to flip the visor up at any time. And it has its battery in the rear, with a total system weight of 550 grams.
What distinguishes Lynx-R2 from these other standalone headsets is its aspheric pancake lenses, developed in partnership with Israeli startup Hypervision. According to Lynx, R2 achieves a field of view of 126° horizontal and 103° vertical. That would make it one of the widest field of view VR headsets to ship as a product anyone can buy, and by far the widest standalone of any kind.
These remarkable lenses are paired with 2312×2160 LCD displays. And Lynx says it's getting the displays for just $30 each, because its development was paid for by Meta, which according to Lynx, planned to use them in the canceled 2026 Quest 4 candidate.
To achieve a reasonable passthrough image quality over the wide field of view, Lynx is using 3K×3K color cameras, advanced Sony IMX616 sensors capturing 10 megapixels per eye at a 90Hz rate, higher than Apple Vision Pro.
Lynx claims an end-to-end latency of between 12 and 20 milliseconds, compared to the 12 milliseconds of Apple Vision Pro.
It's notable that while other headsets like Quest 3 and Vision Pro have lower camera resolution than display resolution, Lynx-R2 has the opposite.
Further, Lynx says R2 has the slimmest "black line" between passthrough and natural peripheral vision of any passthrough headset, obstructing just 6% of the total field of view of the wearer. This black line is slimmer than even typical smart glasses, the startup claims, and it shared a short through-the-lens video captured by a GoPro with a wide-angle lens.
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Through-the-lens shot of Lynx-R2, shot with a wide-angle GoPro.
Meanwhile, the four tracking cameras on the corners of the front enable positional, hand, and controller tracking, while the 0.5 megapixel depth sensor enables 3D room scanning and spatial anchors.
According to the company, Lynx-R2 is designed to be open, modular, and repairable. LynxOS, its Android fork, is open source, and the headset has an open bootloader. Buyers will have raw unrestricted access to the sensors via APIs. Lynx says it will publish IO schematics for developers who want to add additional sensors. And R2 is built with screws instead of glue, with the company planning to sell spare parts like batteries, mainboards, and camera modules to customers.
Lynx R2
Meta Quest 3
Samsung Galaxy XR
Displays
2312×2160 LCD
2064×2208 LCD
3552×3840 micro-OLED
Refresh Rates
90Hz
60-120Hz (90Hz Home) (72 App Default)
60-90Hz (72Hz Default)
Stated FOV
126°H × 103°V
110°H × 96°V
109°H × 100°V
Platform
LynxOS (Lynx)
Horizon OS (Meta)
Android XR (Google)
Chipset
Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2
Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2
Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2
RAM
16GB
8GB
16GB
Strap
Rigid Plastic (Flip-Up)
Soft (Modular)
Rigid Plastic (Fixed)
Face Pad
Forehead (Open)
Upper Face (Enclosed)
Forehead (Open)
Weight
550g Total
397g Visor 515g Total
545g Total
Battery
Rear Pad
Internal
Tethered External
Hand Tracking
✅
✅
✅
Eye Tracking
❌
❌
✅
Face Tracking
❌
❌
✅
Torso & Arm Tracking
❌
✅
❌
Passthrough
10MP
4MP
6.5MP
IR Illuminators
✅
❌
✅
Active Depth Sensor
iToF
❌
dToF
Price
TBA
$500 (512GB)
$1800 (256GB)
Lynx-R2 is set to arrive "this summer", priced somewhere between Meta Quest 3 and Samsung Galaxy XR. Unlike with R1, Lynx will not be doing preorders this time. According to Larroque, when it's available to buy, it will be ready to ship immediately.
"Starting" in Horizon OS v85, the new 'Navigator' UI will become the default, and Horizon Feed will be "gradually" removed from the OS.
In a Meta Community Forums post, a 'Community Manager' with the handle h.taylor announced the upcoming changes, set to arrive in the next version of the Horizon OS of Quest headsets:
As announced during Connect, we’ve been testing Navigator and will ramp up the rollout later this year, starting in v85. As Navigator rolls out, we’ll also begin gradually sunsetting the Horizon Feed in VR.
What’s changing
• Navigator will become the default landing experience when users turn on their headset.
• Navigator brings experiences, friends and settings together in one place.
• As part of this shift, we’ll be sunsetting the Horizon Feed in VR.
Horizon OS v83 started rolling out in November, and there's no set date for the arrival of v85.
Navigator Becoming Default
Since the release of Oculus Go almost eight years ago, Meta's standalone VR operating system has seen numerous visual changes, but the general interface architecture remained essentially the same.
You had a floating horizontal menu bar slightly below you, called the Universal Menu, showing the time and your device battery levels and containing shortcuts to key system interfaces, as well as a combination of your most recent and eventually a few of your favorite apps. All 2D interfaces, including system features like the app Library, Quick Settings, and Notifications, opened as 2D windows, treated like any other.
Then, in May last year, Meta started a very slow rollout of a full Horizon OS UI overhaul, called 'Navigator', which moves the main system interfaces like Library, Quick Settings, Notifications and Camera into a new large overlay that appears over both immersive and 2D apps.
With Navigator, system interfaces no longer shift around when opening other windows, and it's easier to launch new apps. Navigator's library also allows you to pin up to 10 items, somewhat akin to the Start Menu on Windows.
At launch, Navigator also had a murky gray background with an oval shape. It was seemingly intended to improve contrast. But as well as obscuring your view of what was behind it, be it passthrough or a virtual world, it just didn't look good. So Meta got rid of that and made bringing up Navigator dim the background instead.
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Meta presenting the evolved Horizon OS Navigator UI.
With Horizon OS v83 PTC in October, Meta started rolling out an evolved version of Navigator, which it teased at Connect 2025.
The evolved Navigator has a new Worlds tab for Horizon Worlds destinations, and you no longer see worlds in your app Library at all. Speaking of the Library, it now features interleaving offset rows, similar to Apple's visionOS.
The new Navigator also has a new overlay-level People tab with shortcuts to your friends, as well as a You tab that shows your avatar and lets you change your active status.
Finally, the new Navigator lets you easily hide or show all your 2D windows by double pressing the Meta button on the right Touch controller, or for hand tracking, opening your right palm and double tapping your thumb to your index finger.
Horizon Feed Being Removed
Horizon Feed is the default 2D app that launches when you cold boot your Quest headset.
Originally simply called 'Explore', the feed shows you suggested Horizon Worlds destinations, store apps, VR videos, Instagram reels, and online followers, as well as suggested friends to "catch up" with and apps to "jump back in" to.
Screenshot by UploadVR.
The Community Forums post tells developers that the version of Horizon Feed inside the headset "is not a high-intent surface, and users often see it without a specific intent to browse or purchase apps".
"Because of that, it historically has not driven strong entitlement conversion, and we don’t expect significant revenue impact for the vast majority of developers", the post reads.
That essentially seems to be Meta admitting that Horizon Feed is something that most Quest owners just close immediately on booting the headset, like an unwanted popup, and wasn't successful at getting people to buy the apps that it suggested.
The coming removal of Horizon Feed from Horizon OS comes as Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth suggested that the company's repeated push to Quest owners to use Horizon Worlds came at "an expense of user experience", vowing to "let VR be what it is, what it does" and "focus a lot more on the third-party content library, the ecosystem that's developed there".
In a series of interviews at Davos, Meta's CTO explained why the company is reducing its investment in VR.
If you somehow missed it: last week Meta shut down three of its acquired VR game studios, conducted significant layoffs at a fourth, canceled the Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel, and announced the shutdown of Horizon Workrooms and its Quest headsets for business offering. These actions came a month after the company officially confirmed "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables".
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has finally made public statements about the VR layoffs and shutdowns, via a series of interviews.
One of the interviews was with veteran tech reporter Alex Heath. While Heath hasn't yet shared the interview (this is set to happen in the coming days), he has published an article with key quotes wherein Bosworth declares that "VR is growing less quickly than we hoped".
“We’re still continuing to invest heavily in this space, but obviously, VR is growing less quickly than we hoped,” Bosworth apparently told Heath. “And so you want to make sure that your investment is right-sized.”
According to Heath, Bosworth claimed that Meta has seen “really, really positive pickup” in Horizon Worlds on smartphones, and plans to double down on this with continued investment in Horizon on mobile.
“You've got a team that actually has product market fit in a huge market on mobile phones, and they're having to build everything twice. They're building it once for mobile phones, and building again for VR. There's a pretty easy way to increase their velocity: just let them build for mobile. So Horizon is very focused now on mobile — not exclusively, but almost exclusively,” Bosworth is quoted as saying.
Another interview, available in full on YouTube, was conducted by Axios' chief technology correspondent Ina Fried.
In it, Bosworth gave a very similar explanation for Meta's shift in strategy.
"It's like any investment, you're gonna look at how you do over the course of years and you're gonna reinvest in some areas and trim your losses in others.
For us, we're seeing tremendous growth of our metaverse on mobile. You know, Horizon is this thing that started on VR headsets. But obviously there's much more users today on mobile phones. We've been pivoting over the last year to focus on the mobile market and it's going really well, and so you kinda wanna double down on that."
Bosworth also seemed to suggest that Meta's significant investment in the VR side of Horizon Worlds, and repeated pushes to convince Quest headset wearers to use it, came at "an expense of user experience".
"We're gonna let VR be what it is, what it does", Bosworth said. "We're gonna have focus a lot more on the third-party content library, the ecosystem that's developed there."
That seems to suggest that Meta will pull back on pushing Horizon Worlds for VR users and on making its own content, leaving the content ecosystem to third-party developers and letting headset owners choose the content they want.
Palmer Luckey thinks Meta closing its VR game studios is "a good thing for the long-term health of the industry", and that the narrative of it "abandoning" VR is "obviously false".
If you somehow missed it: last week Meta shut down three of its acquired studios – Twisted Pixel Games (Deadpool VR), Sanzaru Games (Asgard's Wrath), and Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR) – and conducted significant layoffs at a fourth: Camouflaj (Batman: Arkham Shadow).
The closures are part of Meta's wider strategy of, in its own words, "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables", and the layoffs have affected around 10% of Meta's Reality Labs division, around 1500 people.
This strategy shift has led some in the industry to speculate that Meta is abandoning VR entirely. But Oculus founder Palmer Luckey doesn't agree.
In a post on X, Luckey argued that last week's events were "not a disaster", pointing out that Meta still employs more people working on VR than any other company "by about an order of magnitude".
Further, Luckey explains that "crowding out the rest of the entire ecosystem" by forcing third-party developers to compete with blockbusters like Batman and Deadpool games that cost more to make than they would ever return "doesn't make sense", suggesting that the end of this strategy will be "a good thing for the long-term health of the industry".
He further notes that while some of these titles are received well, others fail, revealing that Rock Band VR, a 2017 Oculus Rift exclusive, sold just 700 copies.
Here's Palmer Luckey's full statement:
"I have an opinion on the Meta layoffs that is contrary with most of the VR industry and much of the media, but strongly held.
This is not a disaster. They still employ the largest team working on VR by about an order of magnitude. Nobody else is even close. The "Meta is abandoning VR" narrative is obviously false, 10% layoffs is basically six months of normal churn concentrated into 60 days, strictly numbers wise.
The majority of the 1,500 jobs cut in Reality Labs (out of 15,000) were roles working on first-party content, internally developed games that competed directly with third party developers. I think this is a good decision, and I thought the same back when I was still at Oculus.
Change always sucks because people lose their jobs in the process, but in a world of limited resources, Meta heavily subsidizing their own (with money, marketing, placement, etc) at the expense of core technical progress and platform stability doesn't make sense. Crowding out the rest of the entire ecosystem, even less so. Every developer big and small, even the hyper-efficient ones, have had an extremely hard time competing with games developed by Meta-owned teams with budgets and teams that spend vastly in excess of earning potential. People will point out that these teams did an awesome job and got awesome reviews from critics and customers alike - yes, and fucked up though it is, that makes the problem even worse!
Some people will say "they should have just funded those developers as external studios rather than acquiring them, then!". Yes, I agree, but hindsight is 20/20. Do you think Oculus expected to only sell 700 copies of Rock Band VR after spending eight figures to make sure it was ready and awesome for Rift CV1 launch, to the point of bundling the guitar adapter with every single headset? Of course not, but sometimes you learn what the world actually wants from you the hard way.
TL;DR, I feel really bad for the people impacted, but this is a good thing thing for the long-term health of the industry, especially the ongoing incentives.
After being fired from Oculus by Facebook in 2017, Luckey founded Anduril, a defense firm that makes and sells drones, loitering munitions, interceptors, cruise missiles, sentry towers, and even unmanned submarines, as well as a software system that integrates them and other assets into a unified view of the battlespace. It was most recently valued at over $30 billion.
In 2024, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth publicly apologized to Luckey, an apology which he also publicly accepted. And last year, Anduril and Meta announced a partnership to build XR products for US and allied militaries, starting with the EagleEye AR/VR helmet.
"The people acting like I am some stooge who will obviously agree with everything Meta does need to read a history book or something, jfc
Oculus had a strong internal mandate to NOT be Nintendo and instead build things that build the ecosystem. Returning to that is good."
In response to the idea that he was "stooge who will obviously agree with everything Meta does", Luckey suggests those under that belief read a history book.
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UploadVRHenry Stockdale